Wings (1927)

Truly Dreadful Film

Captivating movie !

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

I liked this movie. For the year that this movie released it was a very entertaining war movie. The dog fights were fantastic and there was a good amount of action. Some scenes were surprisingly funny. During the dog fights if a plane was shot down the fire was actually colored. The scenes where both David and Jack were getting chased was intense. I liked this movie, I was surprised by it. The only problem that I had with the movie was when David was getting chased during a dog fight and the person chasing David just stopped chasing him, I thought that was weird. I thought that it was going to be another movie were everyone was just standing around and talking, but it wasn't it had a lot of action and it also showed a good friendship between Jack and David.

This movie was about World War 1. It showed the story of three people. A rich man, a poor one, and a love stricken girl who did her part in the war also. It at first glorified the war and showed how it was every man's dream to fly but then you can see a shift where it shows death in the war and how it can happen really quick. This movie does have a love component to keep the attention of the audience because a movie solely about war can sometimes struggle to keep the audience interested. The movie did a good job of showing the sides of the two soldiers David and Jack but I wish it had shifted its focus a little more towards Mary beyond being in love with Jack. Wings was a good movie and it was well done. The camera work was good and the characters appealing. It also had good character development and good relationships between the characters, mainly David and Jack's friendship. The movie really made you feel and connect with the characters and their plight. I would recommend this movie to anyone who likes silent films and war, it was a well done movie.

Obviously films made almost a century ago are going to look dated but even so, Wings has not aged particularly well. Certain silent films such as Greed, The Crowd, The Gold Rush, Nosferatu, Safety Last or The Wind are just as effective nowadays as they were when they were first released.The big draw towards Wings back in the Nineteen-Twenties was for its spectacular and innovative depiction of air combat during World War I and for the time these scenes were handled well and largely 'done for real' when there wasn't CGI technology to fall back on. When viewed now, however, the air battles seem overlong and unspectacular, and the constant interruption with descriptive captions hardly helps either. The problem is that they've just been bettered so many times since. Wings couldn't, and doesn't, compare well with something like, say, Pearl Harbor (2001), a modern equivalent in many respects.Luckily, Wings has more going for it than just aerial duels and I found that its strengths lay in its human drama rather than the action scenes as it sports a good cast on top of their game with a plot centred around two friends who are both love rivals for the same girl, a situation complicated further by another girl whose love for one of the protagonists is unrequited.Here and there are some moments of great innovation with the camera and even some unexpected turns of the plot - for example, and most unusually for a war movie of the time, the enemy is not portrayed as wholly evil. Although Wings is essentially a serious film, there are some comedy sequences along the way which I found tedious and unfunny (much involving El Brendel's character). The business with the champagne bubbles extended way past the point of interest. And yet other moments are strangely absent: What happened to Jobyna Ralston's character at the end?A triumph in its day, Wings is still very watchable, but there are other films from the same period which can still offer a much richer viewing experience.

It's 1917 in a small town. Jack Powell dreams of flying. Mary Preston is his clingy next door neighbor. He falls for city girl Sylvia Lewis but she's actually in love with David Armstrong from the richest family in town. The boys both join the war and become flyboys. They meet Herman Schwimpf who gets pushed as a flyer but rejoins as a mechanic. They would battle the great German ace Count von Kellermann leader of the Flying Circus. Mary joins the effort as an ambulance driver.The story is weak melodrama with El Brendel trying to inject some comedy. The backstory is old fashion and slow. It's a boring start. The planes, the men and the machineries of war is what this film excels in. The flying footage is terrific and the battles are impressive. The love quadrangle keeps it from truly taking off. Nevertheless, one has to love those planes.