The Aeronauts

Twenty-for-Seven #5 (Day 2)

2019, d. Tom Harper - AmazonPrime

Here's that origin story of the science of weather forecasting that absolutely nobody was asking for.

Seriously, that's ultimately what this tale is, the remarkable, probably-not-even-close-to-accurate adventure partaken by a female balloonist and a male scientist as they ventured into the upper atmosphere of the earth.

Real-life scientist James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) is laughed at by one of those big assemblies of old white men ("royal society of whatever") about his thoughts on meteorological studies, that there was any science at all to predicting the weather.  He set out to hire a balloonist to take him up high in the sky to advance his studies but nobody would take him on, at least in this story.

Enter Amelia Wren (Felicity Jones), a fictional construct still pained and traumatized by the loss of her husband in a ballooning accident the year or so previous.  It takes much convincing on Glaisher's part but he manages to secure the funding and gets her to agree to pilot him. 

After some crown appeasement they take to the sky and venture up, up, up.  In their 80 minute journey they face storm clouds, butterflies, freezing cold, thinning air, and much worse on the way down.

The film is told inter-cutting the voyage with the history of how the adventure came to be, and the odd (likely to pad out the run-time) look at people on the ground waiting in anticipation for news of the journey (or looking through spyglasses). 

There are some real and CGI vistas which are both quite gorgeous but it's not enough to sustain the film.  Moments of action and excitement seem largely manufactured, and are more eye-rolling than thrilling.

In real life, Glaisher was much older than Redmayne when he made his first of many trips into the sky, and he was accompanied by a male pilot, not a female one.  I find that "based on a true story" is the biggest burden to any film as it then sets the viewer on a mental path to validating the events as portrayed in the film, and much of what happens here seems unlikely.  One or two lesser intense mishaps perhaps, but so much going wrong in one short flight seems unlikely.

Redmayne and Jones have worked together before, thus they have an easy, established chemistry.  The film takes admirable pains not to put them into any sort of romantic entanglements (that would have been unbearable).  They seem like professional colleagues who don't necessarily trust each other at first but have to come to rely upon each other for survival. 

It's passable entertainment but I needed to be doing something else (a puzzle, actually) while watching it.