Flyboys seemed to play a little long, and i would have liked to have seen more flying and aerial combat, but i enjoyed it. I’ve never seen anything before about WWI dogfighting. Not sure if there’s been a film about it before—but it was especially interesting to think about because it was a completely new concept. Flight was only a few years old then, let alone piloting armed planes to attack your enemy. It’s amazing these kids signed up to do this and were actually successful. There was no real training for it back then.

And it looked convincing. The flight scenes were obviously visual effect shots, not necessarily because they didn’t look real, but because there’s no way they’d have all these period biplanes flying around shooting at each other. There’s a pretty technically in-depth article about the film’s special effects at fxguide [via DV Guru]. It’s heavy on the industry speak, but there’s some pictures.