The Aeronauts

The Aeronauts is a very tense and technically brilliant film. Some of the visuals this movie manages to pull off were incredible and the visual effects, stunts, and camera work were so good, I didn't doubt for a second that the characters were in that balloon and one second away from falling to their death. Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones also have a very natural chemistry, and while the scenes that take place outside of the balloon were formulaic, they weren't completely insufferable. As far as historical accuracy goes, if I wanted historical accuracy I would read a Wikipedia article. I watch movies for thrills and entertainment, and this move delivers a lot of thrills.

This is an idea of alternative history. So the filmmakers decided to change a famous story of 2 old men in a balloon surviving a disaster to a male researcher and a female pilot surviving a greater disaster. I pretty much dislike all such pointless historical changes in movies. It's also a big disservice to women who actually did fulfil crucial roles during this flight and you could have had important wives, moms, emotional support roles here for actual historical women instead of putting a random historical woman from another time into this setting. It would actually be a huge service to history to depict real people doing what they did in history.

But I love science and history so I was interested in this movie anyhow. Also, it makes sense for a filmmaker to want to put an attractive actress into a balloon with a geeky scientist as you can create quite a potent romance subplot this way. Of course it has to be done right for the weird ahistorical decision to make any sense and unfortunately it's done badly for several reasons.

Firstly, the camera work is terrible much of the time. The balloon scenes have the camera flying around the characters as they are trying to create "action" by never keeping the camera steady. This shows how little they trust the plot, actors and story to deliver entertainment by itself. The director clearly felt the story was boring and needed some fake action this way. Which shows lack of director abilities.

The acting is terrible at times. The ahistorical change needed to make sense so there needed to be a strong connection between the 2 leads. Instead we get a male nerd character with bad acting. And as the guy is supposed to be autistic in some ways there is no connection to the attractive and charming female in his balloon. The scenes between them just feel off and weird as they stare at each other for long periods of time, but never seem to make any real connection. Not on a friendship or romantic level. They just seem to be in their own heads or bicker/make up. This also shows that the change to a female character unfortunately backfired in big ways as it made it all way more weird. Which is unfortunate because there is a strong story here somewhere they just didn't find. It also doesn't work that the man gets them into this huge trouble and she lets him. This makes it all feel like they were just being fools and deserved to suffer a bit.

There is also a friend sidekick character. He is the token minority character in this historical setting that lacked these people. An Indian researcher. He is actually very good and believable and his scenes work well. Then there is the sister who also is fairly good, but unfortunately her scenes largely consist of her whining and wanting her balloon sister to remarry. Which is fine it's just not that fascinating. It's all very fake "big research" stuff and the dialogues about how important the flight is are nonsensical bragging about "changing the world".

Then of course there is the HUGE issue of narration. The story leading up to the flight is told via random flashback scenes. So the first scene is them going up and then we have A TON of flashback sequences. You already know they found the money for it. So having half of the movie being about finding the money and courage for something that is already happening is rather pointless. Flashbacks rarely work well in movies and of course they don't work here, but at least those scenes are properly filmed and acted unlike the intolerable balloon scenes that can feel like nails on a chalkboard with the overly dramatic fake acting and creepy "friendship" where you feel like the man may at any point attack the woman. Which he of course does do at one point, but she uses words to calm him down - luckily for her it works otherwise he'd have killed them both. Also, the brilliant filmmakers decided that flashbacks were the way to go to tell her background story. So it's flashback disaster class.

Messy ahistorical movie. But the idea is really cool and the ahistorical setting could work if the writers were better. I don't trust the filmmakers or writers to make anything better. But the idea could for sure work in a remake. There is a certain charm in the idea I really adore. But I have to give it a 5 because overall it's dull and I wanted to shut it off at the end.

While this does not hold to established history, it does show a fun view of what ballooning in the 1800's might have been like. An entertaining distraction for an evening.

The fact that the female character is completely fictional and was in reality a man is a disgrace.

You can just try to imagine the uproar if a true life female character had been tossed aside for a male actor.

In a truly bizarre twist, the makers of The Aeronauts (2019) decided to tell the story about an 1862 hot-air balloon flight by scientsts James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell by dumping Coxwell and replacing him with a fictional female character. The resulting rewrite of history makes no sense at all and reduces what might have been an interesting story to rubbish. What we're left with is a bowdlerized historical event rendered in CGI to the max. Eddie Redmayne plays the real-life James Glaisher while Felicity Jones plays the fictional Amelia Rennes. The Victoran-Era story that we're left with is preposterous.

To add insult to injury, Jones' character is one of the most annoying females I've seen in a film in a long time ... well since BOOKSMART. Totally out of character for the Victorian Era, this shrieking harpy is loud and pushy and rude. Redmayne pretty much walks through his part. His parents, played by Tom Courtenay and Anne Reid, are way too old for their roles.

Another gripe is the racial parade of Blacks and Asians all done up in the Victorian finery. So there's another PC push that is not historically accurate, plus Redmayne's friend/assistant is Indian. Victorian England was not that culturally fluid.

Probably 90% of the film is dominated by CGI and green screen technologies that always seem to have that flat, unnatural look. And isn't it amazing how Jones can hang on to icy, frozen ropes and dangle in mid air. Total bosh!