“The Aeronauts” Movie Review

    When you live in Michigan and a snow storm hits the state, it sort of limits what you can do and where you can go.   On a bad snow day, you can literally be stuck in your house for hours or even days.  On a snow day like that, you aren’t left with a lot of options for entertainment.  Of course, my old fall back is watching a movie, of course, and the film I decided to watch was called “The Aeronauts”.  The movie is currently available as an Amazon Prime exclusive and this will be the first Amazon Prime exclusive film I review!  We live in exciting times!

    The film tells the story of Amelia, an aeronaut and courageous adventurer, who agrees to help a young man named James Glaisher who seeks to prove he can successfully predict weather patterns from the air using scientific methods.  Amelia and James start to bond over the voyage and everything seems to be going well until they find themselves unexpectedly caught in the middle of a storm.  The pair will have to fight for their lives after the storm causes damage to Amelia’s hot air balloon.

    Amazon Prime has shown promise the past few years in the development of it’s tv shows.  “The Boys”, “Jack Ryan”, and even “The Tick” have shown that Amazon knows what it takes to craft good television, but would “The Aeronauts” show they can tackle a film successfully?  Well, that is a little bit yes and a little bit no.  There are aspects of the film that work, but the film as a whole really does not.

    This film is based on a book entitled “Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air” by Richard Holmes.  The book and film were ‘inspired’ by true events and it’s here where the term ‘inspired’ is used with a lot of liberties.  James Glaisher really took a flight similar to the one depicted in the film, but not with a woman named Amelia.  James Glaisher took his voyage with Henry Coxwell, not Amelia.  The film forsakes historical accuracy for a strong female lead.  Despite this switch which should make the movie at least more compelling, the film remains fairly boring.

    The film’s leads, Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne have excellent chemistry together and clearly enjoy working together.  Jones and Redmayne previously appeared together in the acclaimed film “The Theory of Everything” so perhaps their chemistry together shouldn’t come as too much of a shock.  Aside from the cast, the visuals are also often quite good throughout most of the film (although there are a few poor visual effects shots sprinkled in the film that sour the well done ones a bit for me).

    “The Aeronauts” isn’t on par with Netflix’s best, but it is also a cut above Netflix’s worst so it isn’t a complete wash for Amazon Prime’s original films.  Still, this film leaves a lot to be desired overall and contains all the excitement of a history or science class taught by a drunken feminist revisionist substitute teacher.

Grade: D