i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Aces High is not quite as impressive or as action packed as The Blue Max, but it is still very much worth watching if you want a good film about WWI fighter pilots or a grim and realistic portrayal of war. Malcolm McDowell is very good as always and still looking young here as the Major in charge of a squadron of ever diminishing pilots who keep getting replaced by younger and less experienced pilots. Christopher Plummer is also as good as always as a kindly uncle type figure to the other pilots. Peter Firth plays a young man who idolizes Malcolm McDowell's character and did everything he could to be assigned to his squadron (his sister is also McDowell's girlfriend which causes some awkward feelings between them). McDowell is hard at times on Firth's character but there is a mutual bond and growing respect and warmth throughout. Simon Ward plays an important role in showing a pilot who has had his nerve completely shot and cannot face going into the cockpit again. His scenes show very much the stress that hazardous missions and the constant threat of death or injury must have had on even the bravest of pilots at times (McDowell's character is shown as able in the air and takes down German fighters throughout the film but even he needs alcohol to calm his nerves before his flights).This British film spends much more time on the ground than The Blue Max did and only has about half the flying scenes at most. Still there are some stirring moments, although you may wish some mission or dogfight scenes went on a little longer. The action only takes place over seven days but it feels like a longer period of time and by the seventh day it feels like Peter Firth's character has been among the squadron a good time. The very last scene (apparently sometimes cut on TV) with Malcolm McDowell greeting some new recruits is very moving and you wonder how much longer his character can go on with the stress of countless deaths and danger (nevertheless he does a much better job of Simon Ward at facing his fears but everyone has their limits). There are some nice scenes throughout, like when McDowell brings a German pilot he brought down in combat over to the mess hall to show him a good time before the military take him away or the scene where Firth hangs out with the ground crew rather than the officers. The film is very English in the music, dialog and upper class antics of the pilots, but it also shows the grim realities of war very well and I am sure you will not begrudge these brave men the jolliness they keep up as long as they can. Overall, I preferred The Blue Max as a film but Aces High is also very good and is recommended for fans of Malcolm McDowell, British war movies or WWI flying scenes.

This has just about everything a viewer might expect from a World War I movie about the RFC. Plenty of air combat, jollification in the evenings, fleeting amours in Amiens, some interpersonal conflict in the mess hall.Maybe that's part of the problem. There's hardly anything here that hasn't been seen before.It's by no means a terrible movie. The scenes of flying in those ancient crates are exhilarating. The performances are at least professional in caliber, although we get to see very little of the older establishment -- John Gielgud, Richard Johnson, Ray Milland, Trevor Howard. Instead the responsibility of carrying the movie rests chiefly on the shoulders of Malcolm McDowell as the squadron's commanding officer and Peter Firth as the new replacement, and they do well enough.I gather the play on which this film is based was a highly successful story of the infantry but those responsible for transposing it to the screen have turned it into a mediocre assemblage of familiar incidents without much in the way of glue holding them together.All the scenes are expectable if you've seen "Dawn Patrol" or "The Blue Max." The boyishly eager replacement has had fourteen hours of flight time. The more seasoned pilots put on a brave front, singing and dancing and boozing it up, but some are beginning to crack. McDowell needs a few belts before he can take her up. Simon Ward is unable to fly at all because he's down with "neuralgia" and is terrified of dying.The German pilot who is shot down and captured is given a royal send off to the prison camp. (I first saw that scene in "Grand Illusion.") The virginal Firth has a one-nighter with a French prostitute and returns eager to take up the emotional part of the relationship, but she's with another officer and ignores him.Nobody really talks about the fliers who haven't returned, but when Firth shows emotion, McDowell takes him aside and demands to know if he thinks he's the only one who cares.McDowell was in the same school as Firth and was dormitory chief or something, but nothing comes of the friendship. It's rarely brought up so there isn't the tension associated with such role conflict, as there is in "The Desert Rats." McDowell has been dating Firth's sister but although it's mentioned as a potential complication, it's dropped from the story.The movie LOOKS as if it hangs together but it's really a series of almost unrelated events that need some sort of central narrative conflict to carry us along.There's something else too. The flight scenes aren't really that convincing. The aerial photography is fine but every anti-aircraft shell seems to burst in the pilots' faces. It's as if the gunners were marksmen. The pilot smiles. Ka-boom, and the screen explodes into orange, and then we see the pilot staring grimly through the smoke, but he and his machine are unscathed.I'm not a techie when it comes to the history of guns but these guns fire at too high a cycling rate to be credible. And when an airplane goes into a tailspin it simply doesn't whine until it reaches a crescendo and smashes into the ground -- except in the stilted imaginations of some film makers. I don't know about guns but I know a little about spins. And I don't mean to carp, but such familiar conventions belong in cartoons.I see I've been a little harsh on the film but, as I said, it's not bad. It's just not nearly as good as it might have been. The director and some of the post-production people seem to have been nodding off at the joystick. If you just want to see men in snappy uniforms walking around arguing, singing bawdy songs, or trying to out fly the Hun, you'll find this enjoyable.

While, all WWI aviation flicks bear their fair share of merits and admirable depictions of warfare over the front(with, of course, the exception of the recent and insufferably cheesy "Flyboys", Aces High ranks as unparalleled champion in depicting the forbidding overall sensation of World War I aerial combat. Unlike the romantic and heroic endeavors as popularized by the recruiters (of which I suppose Tony Bill also qualifies), dogfights are portrayed as a harrowing, fearful, and thoroughly traumatic experience, thus culminating in a host of undesirable personality side-effects as reflected by the various manners in which the battle hardened veterans of 56 squadron have exhibited in order to cope with the prolongued stay on the verge of the frontline.Squadron leader Malcolm McDowell, for instance, can longer undergo combat sorties without saturating himself thoroughly with liquor beforehand, which he discloses as one of the reasons in which he's socially isolated himself from his wife in order to spare her any habitual bouts of his drunken temperament. As another pilot, Crawford's constant battle-weariness has progressively waned his psychological status to the breaking point, whereby he attempts to fabricate a medical condition in which to be relocated away from the front. Sure enough, by the film's end, Crawford's constant, as he himself characterizes, "frightful funk's" have finally driven him quite literally past the brink of insanity.As the squadron's sole replacement for the week, newcomer Peter Firth's posting to the squadron is analyzed through the film's progressive subtitles, counting the days in which he survives in order to illustrate the alarmingly brief life-expectancy of a World War I fighter pilot. Needless to say, his dreams of idealism and glory become instantly shattered within a few moments, thus guaranteeing that he himself will come to understand the grim futility of his surroundings prior to his own demise.While, potentially jarring at first, the progressive series of events begin to justify McDowell's constant sense of anguish at the sight of new recruits who arrive and perish with such intensified regularity.Indeed, like all war movies, this film suffers from a few if trivial inaccuracies, including the modified wing sections and landing gear of the SE-5a replicas in effort to render the types as more aerobatically feasible, in conjunction with Presentation of German types that, aside from the Fokker Eindekkers, don't exactly embody representations of particular aircraft type, but accurately reflect the colorful and varied assortment in which the German's utilized multiple types within individual squadron's coupled with an habitual refusal to indulge in camouflaged paint-jobs that would have otherwise augmented their fighting capacity.One aspect, which I greatly appreciated is manner in which Jack Gold accurately establishes how pilots strayed far from one another in the aftermath of an dogfight, thus relaying each pilot with the burden of navigating their own way home. ALso, the widespread devastation of the front is accurately represented as well, as exemplified by a particularly effective moment of solitude, in which Firth and Plummer indulge in picnic at a riverside, only to become flabbergasted at the sight of living fish, swimming upstream. Even within this lull in battle, this moment of relaxation features the ominous but distant rumble of artillery fire in the distance.Granted, over the past week, I've resorted to an habitual level of repeated screenings of this classic, if only to compensate for having endured the veritable cliché-ridden atrocity otherwise known as "Flyboys", a wildly inappropriate endeavor of cartoonish escapism rendered all the more offensive by its perpetual "fun'n'games" conception of war over the Front.If anything, when stacked side-by-side, "Aces High" and "Flyboys" embody the veritable epitome of opposing extremities, thus symbolizing the respective "right" and "wrong" manner in which to construct a movie about World War I aviation.Given that Tony Bill's conception of his own self-styled epic as "the first World War I aviation film in 40 years" reflects his lack of awareness of the existence of this title, I highly recommend that he issue a thorough screening of this movie ASAP. Perhaps then, Tony Bill might learn something outside of his all-too-glamorous and boyish conceptions of aerial warfare over the front, and perhaps a even significant reduction in the overall "cliche factor" to boot.Bottom line: compare and contrast, one will soon come to acquire further merit in which to conclude that "Flyboys" unequivocally sucks.

I really enjoyed this movie. Helps if you are interested in WW1 Airwar of course.Good story, well told by excellent acting. Also brings home the harshness of war and the fragility of life.Malcolm MacDowell is the seasoned veteran Major running a squadron of mainly recruits with a few old hands, it shows the two sides of WW1 the public side showing a brave face to the public at large and then contrasts this with reality of being on the front line.Some of the aircraft are not quite authentic but made to look so, still doesn't really detract from the action and period. Very well done.