Wings

Rating: 3.5/5

The first ever Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Wings is a technical feat.

War epics have always been a pretty big blindspot for me when it comes to the genres of movies I tend to gravitate towards. I appreciate them as a whole and fully understand why people like them, but they've just never been my cup of tea. There are, of course, exceptions, but as a general rule, not my favorite genre.

Recently I've tasked myself with the challenge of watching all Academy Award Best Picture winners in chronological order and my deadline is the 2021 Oscars. I've chosen to do this for two main reasons: one, I've always wanted to give this a shot, and two, I knew it would force me to go out of my cinema comfort zone and dive into films and genres I likely wouldn't otherwise get around to seeing. To start this journey off, I had to watch Wings, the silent film about two men, both in love with the same girl, who go off to be soldiers in the first World War. They find themselves the fighting from the air and growing up faster than they expected. Meanwhile, Mary, played by Clara Bow, decides to enlist as a driver so she can be closer to the boy she loves.

Wings is famous for its aerial scenes, where the opposing sides use their planes for battle. Given the year in which this film came out, 1927, the off the ground fight sequences are really and truly, very impressive. You can tell that the action was actually shot while in flight, and it's almost hard to believe that anyone involved in the making of those scenes made it out alive.

From a visual and technical standpoint, Wings is an absolute triumph. Aside from the plane battles, there's also a scene from a nightclub in Paris where the camera zooms straight across a line of tables, showcasing each couple sitting at their own spot until it reaches one of the main soldiers surrounded by a group of women. It's a very short sequence, but a really impressive one nonetheless.

Overall, I'd say I liked Wings, but I would definitely be lying if I didn't say I got a bit bored on occasion. It's not because it was a silent film, because I've certainly seen silent films that I really enjoyed, I think it had more to do with the length of some of the aerial scenes. As previously mentioned, these scenes are remarkably well done, but some of them go on for almost close to ten minutes, and as someone who already doesn't fully love war movies, it started to become a tad much as the film progressed.

1929 Best Picture Winner-Wings

1929 Best Effects, Engineering Effects Winner-Roy Pomeroy