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The Aeronauts

A high-flying  balloon adventure, a simple pleasure amid the heady Oscar-worthy contenders at this time of year.

The Aeronauts

Grade: B

Director: Tom Harper (Wild Rose)

Screenplay: Jack Thorne (A Long Way Down)

Cast: Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything), Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything)

Rating: PG-13

Runtime: 1h 40m

By: John DeSando

“You don't change the world simply by looking at it, you change it through the way you choose to live in it." Amelia Wren (Felicity Jones)

The Aeronauts will satisfy your Around-the-World-in-80-Days yearnings for an old-fashioned Hollywood adventure film in a gas balloon. Director Tom Harper along with scribe Jack Thorne hits  the beats of a partially-historical flight in mid-19th century England.

The action is centered in a balloon basket that rises to over 30,000 feat where two aeronauts, fictional Amelia (Erhardt anyone?) Wren (bird anyone) and real-life James Glaisher, do nail-biting navigating amidst storms and ice to set the world record and, for him, launch world recognition of meteorology as science. (Allow for fiction's sake that they didn’t bring gloves and their garb seems woefully slight given five-degree temperature!)

For the Little-Women fans who like their heroines active and equal, this adventure is made to order as she is the daring  pilot to his sometimes clueless navigator/scientist. It's refreshing to see her save the enterprise with pluck, courage, and smarts. Because these two actors shared The Theory of Everything a few years ago, you can count on effective chemistry with no shenanigans 7 miles up.

The tropes are all here: the high-hatted, mustachioed Brit codgers of the Royal Society denying James funding because they couldn’t possibly know how beneficial such science will be for hordes of TV weatherpeople a century later, and the death-defying flying with impressive green screen and CGI, to name two common features of the genre.

The Aeronauts is an Amazon original that played briefly here before going to the tube. The show is so benign and suspenseful that the entire family will enjoy it on home theater splendor.

“You are the only person who could fly us higher than anyone has ever been.” James to Amelia

John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com

 

John DeSando holds a BA from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in English from The University of Arizona. He served several universities as a professor, dean, and academic vice president. He has been producing and broadcasting as a film critic on It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics for more than two decades. DeSando received the Los Angeles Press Club's first-place honors for national entertainment journalism.