Flyboys vs The Blue Max

I've never seen this "Blue Max" but it sounds like the flying and dogfighting scenes are pretty good in it.

Former Air Force F-4E Phantom Weapons Systems Officer (backseater) from the late '70s-early '80s weighing in here. For those of you haven't caught my rants on the Flyboys board, for an accurate depiction of aerial combat, The Blue Max is it, although on a scale of 0 to 10 with Pearl Harbor and A Yank in the RAF being 0 and The Blue Max being a 10, Flyboys is about a 9.0 to 9.5 (regardless of which war; at this point, I usually go into my rant about how a P-40 Warhawk fighting a Mitsubishi Zero over Pearl Harbor looks pretty much the same as a Sopwith Camel fighting a Fokker Triplane, and so do a Spitfire fighting a Messerschmitt Bf-109 over London, a P-51 Mustang fighting a Focke-Wulf 190 over Berlin, an F-86 Sabre fighting a MiG-15 over the Yalu River, an F-4E Phantom fighting a Mig-21 over Hanoi and an F-15 Eagle fighting a Mig-29 over Baghdad)! You can catch a continuation of this rant at www.voicenet.com/~lpadilla/pearl.html, especially about how in the 40 years between The Blue Max and Flyboys, NOBODY in Hollywood knew what a real dogfight looked like while George Lucas led everyone down a primrose path with Star Wars, patting himself on the back while doing so.

I just remember getting into my first big furball at a Cope Thunder exercise (the Pacific Air Forces equivalent of Red Flag) and thinking, "Damn! This is just like The Blue Max except everyone's more spread out!"

But I still like the storyline of Flyboys better than The Blue Max.

Uh...Blue Max has Ursula Andress in a state of undress; isn't THAT enough to recommend it?

NickM

Blue Max is a well made film. Flyboys will ever be in my top ten worst movie experiences of all time. I hated it from beginning to end. I've never, Never, seen a movie more predictable. Horrid, horrid film making.

Basically, The Blue Max is a classic, made in times when a movie required real work and effort. Flyboys, like Pearl Harbor, was made at a computer console and is aimed at the video game crowd, soley because that is today's audience. Apples to oranges.

Man, if you want to see some unbelievable stunt flying, you guys need to watch William Wellman's 'Wings' (silent, 1927), which won the first ever Academy Award for Best Picture, or Howard Hughes' 'Hell's Angels' (1930). Either movie puts everything discussed here to shame. It's not even close. Both movies used real WWI fighter pilots. Hughes did some of the flying himself in 'Hells Angels,' and crashed his plane. But he was luckier than the three stunt pilots who were killed during filming. Hughes originally shot the movie silent in the late 20s, but didn't think it was good enough and reshot the entire thing with sound and even a brief segment with Jean Harlow in color.