Look! Up in the air! It’s a benignly entertaining ballooning movie!
As far as family-friendly holiday movies go, you could do worse than British writer/director Tom Harper’s The Aeronauts. An old-fashioned Victorian costume drama, it’s thrilling without being scary, has no sex, swearing, or violence, and extolls the virtues of science, adventure, and reaching for the stars, as it were. And sure, you may forget about it as soon as you walk out of the theater, but you’ll have a pleasant enough time watching its story unfold.
While that may not exactly be a ringing endorsement, there’s definitely a need for this type of innocuous, entertaining fare, and The Aeronauts fits that category to the tee. The film’s casting is one of its strengths. Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne, last seen together as husband and wife in 2014’s Oscar winning Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything, reunite here to play, respectively, Amelia Wren, a brash, daredevil gas-powered balloon pilot, and James Glaisher, a humorless, no-nonsense aspiring meteorologist.
Harper and his co-writer Jack Thorne waste no time in establishing the conflict between their two protagonists. The film opens with James impatiently waiting for Amelia at the balloon they are to launch together to try to break the world’s gas ballooning height record. When Amelia enters, decked out like a carnival performer, she jokes loudly and cheerfully plays to the assembled crowd, much to James’s consternation. All he does is grumble and tell her she’s late. Immediately, then, we know that uh oh — she’s a bit wild and free, and he’s a stick in the mud. What will happen when they’re up in the balloon together, possibly facing challenges and danger!?
From there, the picture zips along as expected, occasionally filled with cringe-inducing dialog: “Some reach for the stars; some push others toward them,” James’s colleague John (Himesh Patel, in his first appearance since the far better Yesterday) says solemnly. Later Amelia utters, in all sincerity, “You change the world through the way you choose to live in it.” Well, sure.
In between all this profundity, flashbacks tell us how James and Amelia first became partners in this ballooning endeavor. James, convinced a study of the skies could yield important weather predicting data, is laughed at by his fellow London academics, and Amelia, a quick and capable adventurer in a man’s world, has suffered a tragedy (also recounted in flashbacks) that will explain some of her motivations later in the film. It should be noted that James Glaisher was a real person; the film is based on Richard Holmes’s 2013 book Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air, which details Glaisher’s 1862 attempt to break the gas-powered balloon altitude record. Amelia, however, is a fictional character, a composite of different male and female balloon pilots of the time.
Fortunately, Jones and Redmayne do have a natural chemistry, despite the clichéd nature of their onscreen personalities. They play well off each other, and their rapport and respect for each other is evident. Their pairing is one reason to give the film a chance; the other is the cinematography. Cinematographer George Stone gives us some jaw-dropping, stunning visuals from the balloon’s vantage point. If you’re afraid of heights, you may find yourself closing your eyes to ease the queasiness. If you do see the film, make a point to see it before it leaves theaters, as watching it on a small screen will diminish one of its main selling points.
Once airborne, our dynamic duo of course faces a barrage of struggles both expected and unanticipated. Will they succeed in breaking the record? Will they make any scientific discoveries? Will the balloon stay airworthy? Will they survive the freezing temperatures and thin oxygen? And, perhaps most importantly: Will they land safely!? You can probably guess the answers to all these questions, but awaiting their reveal is decently enjoyable. And, to Harper and Thorne’s credit, even though their picture takes place in the repressive Victorian era, they give Amelia just as many — if not more — heroic moments as they do James. The film thus succeeds as a rousing Girl Power movie, and families with preteen and teen girls may want to see it for that reason alone.
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The Aeronauts opens today at Bay Area theaters.
