The Aeronauts
Directed by: Tom Harper
Written by: Jack Thorne
Starring: Felicity Jones, Eddie Redmayne, Himesh Patel, Tom Courtenay, Phoebe Fox, Anne Reid, Tim McInnerny, Robert Glenister, Rebecca Front, Vincent Perez
Action/Adventure/Biography - 100 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 2 Dec 2019
Written by: Jack Thorne
Starring: Felicity Jones, Eddie Redmayne, Himesh Patel, Tom Courtenay, Phoebe Fox, Anne Reid, Tim McInnerny, Robert Glenister, Rebecca Front, Vincent Perez
Action/Adventure/Biography - 100 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 2 Dec 2019
No genre may ever entirely disappear from the cinematic landscape, but some are subject to either the rise and fall in their popularity among audiences and Hollywood’s ambition to invest in them. Whatever happened to the Saturday matinee feature? I came along too late for these weekending showcases, but some folk recall a time when the Saturday afternoon double feature was a staple - cowboys and Indians, Jason and the Argonauts, that sort of thing. Whether it was the collapse of their associated main street movie palaces, parents finding other methods to occupy their kids’ time rather than four hours of film, or, most likely, television, the purposefully made Saturday matinee movie has been on life support for decades. Director Tom Harper’s The Aeronauts would be a perfect fit for 12 year-old popcorn munchers. Kids love the mystique of balloons and the idea of a perilous journey. However, Harper sidestepped what perhaps should have been material for kids still fascinated by adventure rather than the opposite sex and created a haphazard genre mish-mash of sorts with enough egregious “Inspired by a true adventure" chutzpah to launch a gas balloon into outer space.
Even though the finished product feels thrown together, it is obviously not low effort. The filmmakers built a fully-functioning and accurate replica of a 19th-century gas balloon. It looks and feels real because it is. That is Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones way up there in a balloon, certainly not at 36,000 feet, but still up there higher than a sound stage would allow them to be. The Aeronauts earns marks for authenticity in craftsmanship and production design; however, where it counts - story and narrative flow - the film crash lands with atrocious consequences. First, the structure. Rather than tell a chronological tale of a boy yearning to see what’s up there, bringing the whole project together, and then setting off into the unknown, Harper and screenwriter Jack Thorne cut the story into pieces. When James Galisher (Redmayne, Early Man) and Amelia Rennes (Jones, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) begin the ascent in the film’s first few minutes, we do not particularly care.
Even though the finished product feels thrown together, it is obviously not low effort. The filmmakers built a fully-functioning and accurate replica of a 19th-century gas balloon. It looks and feels real because it is. That is Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones way up there in a balloon, certainly not at 36,000 feet, but still up there higher than a sound stage would allow them to be. The Aeronauts earns marks for authenticity in craftsmanship and production design; however, where it counts - story and narrative flow - the film crash lands with atrocious consequences. First, the structure. Rather than tell a chronological tale of a boy yearning to see what’s up there, bringing the whole project together, and then setting off into the unknown, Harper and screenwriter Jack Thorne cut the story into pieces. When James Galisher (Redmayne, Early Man) and Amelia Rennes (Jones, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) begin the ascent in the film’s first few minutes, we do not particularly care.
We are not invested yet; nobody is enthralled. We don’t know them. There is no backstory. Do they loathe each other? Do they merely tolerate one another to serve their own ends or some higher purpose? The cold opening prevents any amount of earned tension with what should be a turning point event, the balloon leaves the ground. Instead, after some dialogue innuendo or an allusion to a previous event, Harper pauses the film, and more crucially, the momentum, to go into flashback mode covering bits and pieces regarding Amelia’s sob story and love/hate relationship with ballooning and James’s conviction there is science to be discovered in weather prediction. So much is fabricated within The Aeronauts that I hope the fact that meteorology being considered junk science at one point, akin to astrology, was real. James has one of those scenes we are more than familiar with, pleading with the Royal Society who surround and mock him for his wild claims about discerning tomorrow's weather patterns. The Lost City of Z and even the animated film Missing Link both cover the same territory.
James has something to prove and Amelia has ghosts to confront. Perhaps working in tandem as the altitude increases will allow both of them to reach undiscovered truths. Felicity Jones has more heavy-lifting, and perhaps because she is a fictional character, is the film’s hero. Harper keeps James’s head down checking instruments and passive aggressively needling Amelia. Amelia tries to keep the duo alive even after she recognizes they are succumbing to hypoxia and agrees to proceed against her better judgement. If you’ve seen the previews, you know Ameilia winds up on top of balloon sections no aeronaut plans to touch. In a chronological affair, her acrobatics and death-defying maneuvers would thrill beyond measure, but in the patchwork quilt of back-and-forth time shifts, it is less capstone than, “Ooh, someone is finally doing something!” There is all the room in the sky for a quality balloon movie, full of swashbuckling thrills and some quirky ballooning facts, but Harper’s odd mixture of fiction combined with “this sort of happened” misses all targets.
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