The Aeronauts. (PG)
Directed by Tom Harper
Starring Felicity Jones, Eddie Redmayne, Phoebe Fox, Himesh Patel, Tim McInnerny and Tom Courteney. 101 mins.
This tale of Victorian derring-do, in which a scientist James Glaisher (Redmayne) goes on a spiffing adventure with a balloonist Amelia Wren (Jones) to fly higher than anyone has done before and in the process invent the weather forecast, is beautiful to behold but full of hot air.
The narrative covers the duration of their historic 1862 balloon journey, starting in Regents Park and rising up through a thunderstorm to above the clouds while their respective backstories - all the other scientists laugh at him because he's not as posh as them and disparage his notions of meteorology as something close to witchcraft; overcoming the death of her husband who was a French ballooning legend - are gone over in flashbacks. So it's like a costume drama version of the Evil Knievel biopic, in which George Hamilton's Knievel looks back over his life while preparing to a leap over a selection of buses.
The balloon flight is, for the most part, beautifully rendered. Granted, you never really believe Redmayne and Jones are 7 miles up in the sky, but outside of the characters' detached relationship to them, the aerial panoramas were startling and convincing enough to have me feeling a little queasy. It's one thing to be anxious about heights, but to be anxious about the CGI of heights is a little pathetic really. If I'd been around back then I fear I would have contributed little to the expansion of our Queen Victoria's glorious Empire.
The Aeronauts is definitely a fun adventure but little more than that. Putting Redmayne and Jones in a pretend aerial box doesn't really do much for their acting but then giving them dialogue that often seems historically anachronistic doesn't help either. During their perilous journey, Jones performs various action hero levels acts of daring, dangling thousands of feet in the air often by her foot, usually while Redmayne is unconscious or fussing over his scientific equipment. These are not the kind of things one is accustomed to seeing in the British costume drama and they both stretch its historical credibility and confuse the viewer about what kind of film we are supposed to be watching. It's trying to be both Downton and Indiana Jones.
According to the credits the script isn't Based on a True Story, but Real Events, which means almost anything could be made up. In this case the biggest application of the Artistic License is that Wren wasn't on the actual flight. Or that there was ever an Amelia Wren; the character is a composite of real life figures. If you want to make a statement about female empowerment, surely it would be more effective if it actually happened. Once you've based a historical drama on a fiction, the tendency is to come up with ever taller tales until no one believes any of it.
Directed by Tom Harper
Starring Felicity Jones, Eddie Redmayne, Phoebe Fox, Himesh Patel, Tim McInnerny and Tom Courteney. 101 mins.
This tale of Victorian derring-do, in which a scientist James Glaisher (Redmayne) goes on a spiffing adventure with a balloonist Amelia Wren (Jones) to fly higher than anyone has done before and in the process invent the weather forecast, is beautiful to behold but full of hot air.
The narrative covers the duration of their historic 1862 balloon journey, starting in Regents Park and rising up through a thunderstorm to above the clouds while their respective backstories - all the other scientists laugh at him because he's not as posh as them and disparage his notions of meteorology as something close to witchcraft; overcoming the death of her husband who was a French ballooning legend - are gone over in flashbacks. So it's like a costume drama version of the Evil Knievel biopic, in which George Hamilton's Knievel looks back over his life while preparing to a leap over a selection of buses.
The balloon flight is, for the most part, beautifully rendered. Granted, you never really believe Redmayne and Jones are 7 miles up in the sky, but outside of the characters' detached relationship to them, the aerial panoramas were startling and convincing enough to have me feeling a little queasy. It's one thing to be anxious about heights, but to be anxious about the CGI of heights is a little pathetic really. If I'd been around back then I fear I would have contributed little to the expansion of our Queen Victoria's glorious Empire.
The Aeronauts is definitely a fun adventure but little more than that. Putting Redmayne and Jones in a pretend aerial box doesn't really do much for their acting but then giving them dialogue that often seems historically anachronistic doesn't help either. During their perilous journey, Jones performs various action hero levels acts of daring, dangling thousands of feet in the air often by her foot, usually while Redmayne is unconscious or fussing over his scientific equipment. These are not the kind of things one is accustomed to seeing in the British costume drama and they both stretch its historical credibility and confuse the viewer about what kind of film we are supposed to be watching. It's trying to be both Downton and Indiana Jones.
According to the credits the script isn't Based on a True Story, but Real Events, which means almost anything could be made up. In this case the biggest application of the Artistic License is that Wren wasn't on the actual flight. Or that there was ever an Amelia Wren; the character is a composite of real life figures. If you want to make a statement about female empowerment, surely it would be more effective if it actually happened. Once you've based a historical drama on a fiction, the tendency is to come up with ever taller tales until no one believes any of it.
