Flyboys

World War I aviation, with its fatalistic heroics and chaotic aerial “dogfights,” has been a spectacular subject for the movies ever since the heyday of Hell’s Angels, The Dawn Patrol and the first Oscar-winner Wings (1927). This independently made big-budget epic ostensibly celebrates the quixotic exploits of the volunteer American pilots in the Lafayette Escadrille circa 1916. But, historical retrospect notwithstanding, director Tony Bill and company plunge the entire production into a lavish and increasingly dispirited melange of trite romance and throwaway visual effects, a virtual travesty of genre and history alike. The aerial battle scenes have a certain energy and interest, but computer-generated imagery renders them mostly innocuous. And a thoroughly sophomoric cast only aggravates the smug, self-congratulatory sentimentality of the screenplay.