Blaine Rawlings (James Franco) has his Texas family range foreclosed on. Briggs Lowry (Tyler Labine) is a rich entitled boy. Eugene Skinner (Abdul Salis) is an African-American boxer in France. Eddie Beagle (David Ellison) is a thief on the run from the law. They and others join WWI as part of the Lafayette Escadrille, the French air squadron. Captain Georges Thenault (Jean Reno) is their French commander. Reed Cassidy (Martin Henderson) is a troubled flying ace.The characters are pretty thin. They are simplistic and thrown into the movie without much backstories. This is not much of a character study. The romance is flat. It's a bit too pretty to be a war movie. It does have some good CGI dogfight action. That's where the movie soars. I love the action but everything else is horribly boring.

I recently saw the film this year and found it entertaining and fun despite the horror of war. Air fights were very real. The award which was for the heroic act is also real, the medal is true. Although it is not real view that only the Germans used Fokker triplane, plus see very simple scenes I think the film gives us a slight context of how the Flyers were preparing for war and especially the historic air squadron in which inspired this film is worthy of inspiration for new generations of young people. The film clearly shows the German red baron but in black, the director shows him as a bad person, this contradicts the figure which shows the German film The Red Baron where this historical figure is presented as a gentleman and which I stuck in my mind the phrase "We do not fight to kill men, but to shoot down aircraft" which expresses the greatness of this person despite the war. Flyboys think that is a good movie and will be the start for new movies that will come and we must not forget that "the future is the past" and why not see in the future a film inspired by the 94th Aero Squadron "Hat in the ring" where the nascent US Air Force got its first ace. After seeing the Flyboys film has left me a question. Why the plane of the hero of the film uses a pair of flags of red and yellow on the wings of his aircraft. This has some historical significance or just liked the director or producer of the film. I appreciate your help about this question.

For a war movie, especially one that focuses on the serious theme of kill or be killed, this movie doesn't really serve justice to the theme's seriousness in its content. In fact this movie feels like a family movie addressing on valor, friendship and equality issues. The works on the visual effects area isn't really one that's worthy for the scale of epic this movie aims to present. This is especially true on the way this movie uses visual effects to enhance the built sets. The visuals kind of stand out and not really blend with the real set. Yet I must say that the movie really tell a good story, not just as a concept, but the way the story unfolds is quite nice, despite there's the obvious cliché about having one man running from his troubles ended up being a hero. James Franco did quite a nice job here. Yet, except for Jean Reno, the rest of the cast doesn't really present something that is outstanding.

I've seen some grousing about the fact that the characters in the film are all composites of several of the real American airmen. They tell us in the very beginning that the film is BASED ON facts, not that it's actually totally factual. I found the film to be an excellent quasi- historical film. The training of the pilots, their quarters, the aerial combat sequences were all very realistic, I thought. Yes, some of the aircraft were computer generated, but it's difficult to gather many actual aircraft of that era together to use in the film - there simply aren't that many flying anymore. The only thing that really hit me as not being true was the fact that nearly all the German aircraft shown in the film were the triple winged ones. They were never the only aircraft in the Luftwaffe and only about 300 were built. It was much slower than many other fighters of it's day, but more agile. I'm sure the filmmakers chose to use them because they're somewhat "iconic" of WW1 German fighter aircraft. In fact, most German aircraft were biplanes. But that's my only complaint. I found the acting, direction and cinematography were very good, editing was very good also. So the execution of the film was very good. There are some great films about WW1 out there and I think this film belongs with them