Wow, what incredible scope, to start more or less in the filmmakers' contemporary era and to reach into the twenty-first century. And you say "Wings over the World" is based in Basra? As in Basra, Iraq? Why Basra? (Is any reason given?)

Thirty years of trench warfare is a hideous nightmare that I'm glad we avoided. Not that we didn't get some lovely horrors in exchange...

at once more leisurely and more driven toward the ultimate goal of man's conquest of the universe --I get the sense from your review that the movie embraces this as a goal? ... That seems very 1930s, somehow.