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.
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.