And, finally, watched the Amazon Prime original film The Aeronauts. I gather this was shown theatrically outside the US but went straight to Prime around these parts. It might have worked theatrically… they have a good cast and a good budget… but the topic might not have driven people to the multiplex.
The film is set in the mid 1800s and focuses on British balloonists as played by Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones. Ballooning is a spectacle that draws crowds and Redmayne is a scientist who desperately wants to study the newly invented field of meteorology. So he needs funding, a balloon, and a pilot which are hard things to come by when he’s merely a theorist. But he finds Felicity Jones’ character who knows how to put on a show for a paying crowd… but she has a balloon-based tragedy in her past and she’s not sure she wants to go up again.
So… yeah… that’s the movie. A couple of very brave souls get in a hot air balloon to study the atmosphere. Of course it doesn’t go smoothly as they encounter storms, cold temperature, thin air, and the like. Whether any of this sounds like fun or not is probably why the flick skipped the movie theaters.
And for the first half of the run time, it’s interesting if not particularly exciting. Just the idea of these people ascending without any real knowledge of what they’ll find when they get to high altitudes is… interesting conceptually. But, as it turns out, the going up is the easy part… the coming down is hard and where the movie actually gets pretty exciting and intense. I’m not buying how realistic their descent was… but that doesn’t mean it didn’t work on a visceral level.
So I kind of recommend this film, especially if you have any interest in… ummm… 19th century ballooning and weather science. Raise your hands, my meteorological homies! I think the flick could work for others as well… especially if you’re twiddling your thumbs at home and have Prime.
Score: 78