Cast:
James Franco --- Blaine Rawlings
Jennifer Decker --- Lucienne
David Ellison --- Eddie Beagle
Martin Henderson --- Reed Cassidy
Micheal Jubson --- Lyle Porter
Tyler Labine --- Briggs Lowry
Jean Reno --- Capt. Thenault
Abdul Salis --- Eugene Skinner
Gunnar Winbergh --- The Black Falcon
Philip Winchester --- William Jensen
A group of pilots join the Lafyette Escadrilles, which is the French Air Force. The movie is set during WWI, and recruits are needed from each country. So you see soon-to-be pilots boarding trains and leaving for France. The main character, Blaine Rawlings(James Franco), is from Texas. When he arrives in France, he tells Captain Thenault(Jean Reno) that he's going to be the best pilot. Sure enough, Blaine's the best at flying. The first few weeks in France, the pilots are trained to fly planes and learn different strategies to use in attacks.
This wouldn't a good war movie without some romance, now would it? After Blaine and a fellow pilot are involved in a minor crash, they're both taken to the hospital. Blaine meets and falls in love with a nurse named Lucienne (Jennifer Decker). But there's a few problems about their relationship. First, Lucienne can fluently speak French but only understands a little bit of English. So there's a huge language barrier. Secondly, Lucienne knows that pilots only live up to 3 weeks. She doesn't want to worry about Blaine and get involved with him, because she'll be heartbroken if he dies.
One reason I liked the movie was because the flying action scenes were done really well. You couldn't tell apart what was fake and what was real. But the ground scenes were pretty boring because nothing interesting happened. Basically the ground scenes were Blaine and Lucienne flirting.
Another thing that I liked about the movie was it wasn't all action. The movie has many sad parts, which were acted really well. There's a scene in the movie when Lucienne has to go to England because because it's safer there than France. This scene made me cry because Blaine and Lucienne want to say so much to each other, but there's a language barrier stopping them. The movie had comedic parts as well. For example, Blaine and one of pilots are flying in the air when they realize there's no fuel in the plane!
Unfortunately, this movie wasn't historically correct. Firstly, the pilots in WWI, lived in a mansion. In the movie, the pilots live in a grand castle-type building. The real mansions were never THIS grand. Secondly, in one scene a pilot gets his hand stuck under a plane and Blaine goes to rescue him. But Blaine has trouble moving the plane because it's too heavy. During WWI, the French planes were made of wood so he'd be able to move it with the amount of strength he used. Thirdly, one of the characters says the average life expectancy of a pilot is 6 weeks long. The REAL life expectancy was only around 3 weeks. Since I'm Canadian, the next mistake made me really angry. Canadians were heavily involved in WWI, and 40% Canadians were in the European air forces. However in this movie, none of the main characters are from Canada. Also, if you pay attention to the planes, some of the motors aren't even moving! There was also a mistake with the costumes. There was no hair dye back in 1917. Yet James Franco had highlights.
Something that was really disturbing about the movie, was that James Franco looked VERY old. James Franco was only 28 when he filmed the movie. But in the movie, James looks like he's over 40.
The ending of the movie was very unexpected because it quickly wrapped up the movie. Instead of having the actors act out the scenes after WWI ended, a simple sentence told you what happened to each character. The movie dragged on during the ground scenes, so there wasn't enough time to make a great ending to the movie.
A lot of critics said this movie was bad, because it wasn't historically accurate. But you'd only notice the mistakes if you learned about WWI in detail. But the action scenes will blow you away, because they're that good. You can just imagine what the pilots had to go through. Other than the weak ending and inaccurate history facts, this was a pretty good movie. But it had the potential to be a great, remembered movie.
