What a shame. Rife with historical inaccuracies, and mired with a phony love subplot, this movie misses the mark on many levels. The screenwriters should had based their story more on "Falcons of France," written by Charles Nordoff and James Norman Hall (famous later for writing Mutiny on the Bounty), about their experiences training and then flying for the French in the famous Lafayette Escadrille. This narrative is rich in detail and there would have been plenty of room for cinematic development. Instead, we get a superficial treatment, with flying in the fight sequences that ignore the laws of gravity and physics, and most amazing, all the German pilots are in Fokker D1 triplane, a type of aircraft not introduced to the war until April, 1917, and most of these planes are depicted in red paint, the color used nearly exclusively by Baron Manfred von Richthofen! The writers did manage to get some things correct. Abdul Salis plays a character based on the real person of Eugene Bullard, the first African-American combat pilot. Bullard enlisted in the French Foreign legion at the start of WWI, and after being wounded at Verdun in 1916, he transferred to the Lafayette Escadrille. The commander of the squadron, Captain Georges Thenault, is correctly named and well played by Jean Reno. The squadron did have a lion as a mascot named Whiskey (the other lion cub was named Soda).<br /><br />I think that more could have been done with the portion of the movie dealing with pilot training. The description of the "Penguin" roller trainers in Nordoff and Hall's book was very droll, and it would have made a good sequence for the film.<br /><br />The aerial sequences are very well done (in CGI) and as long as you don't pay any attention to the lack of real flight dynamics, the fights are exciting to watch. The finale, a set piece battle involving the squadron against multiple Fokker D1s and a Zeppelin, was very exciting. If the rest of the film was done in such a tight, well paced manner, it would have been much more fun to watch.