by Chris Feil
There’s an eyesore on the horizon with The Aeronauts, a cynically observed aerial adventure fatally encumbered by too many pixels. Reuniting the Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne after The Theory of Everything first welcomed both into the Oscar fold, this film is a strange amalgam of influences it fails to live up to. It’s part survival actioner, part vibrant costume drama, and part uplifting women-in-science empowerment tale. But the film’s blending of the three, and its attempts to infuse some modernity to the storytelling, is too clumsy to satisfy any of its points of entry.
The film stars Jones as Amelia Wren, a mid-19th century balloon pilot grieving an unexpected personal cost of her professional on top of patriarchal limitations. Her expertise makes her a fitting partner to Redmayne’s scientist James Glaisher, aiming to prove the science of early meteorology against highly skeptical widespread thought. But Wren and Glaisher have their own clashing of methods and degree of determination. In their flight mission, Glaisher pushes for them to ascend higher than any balloon in history, turning their quest for information into a brief but dangerous fight for survival.
While The Aeronauts certainly makes the case for why their flight should be terrifying, the film itself diffuses its capacity for excitement in most of its narrative decision making. A major misstep comes from the film’s structure, flashing back and forth between their ascent and their backstories leading up to their collaboration and the mission itself. This lack of linear plotting may be a stab at something more original from a very familiar plot, but this strips the mission of the sense of built tension that fatally wounds the film from the jump. With the ensuing sloppy pacing, this foundation makes the film struggle to establish character and stakes beyond just how dangerous it all is - at least that invest us in the chintzy spectacle it relies on so heavily.
More troublesome is how the film is composed with questionable taste, or perhaps a dire lack of self-awareness. Packed with unintentional humor coming from random citizens defined only by their haughtiness in regards to balloons, the film is cartoonish in characterization and its inauthentic visual tapestry. It’s not just that the film’s visual effects don’t convince once they take to the skies, it’s that their unfinished look actively takes us out of the film, zapping any generated suspense. The film is too sickly Technicolor, too polyester - one of the few movies in recent memory that’s resoundingly sank by its garish aesthetics.
Amelia is also a grossly underserved heroine, stuck with more empty platitudes than genuine human feeling. The film makes her tragic circumstance into a kind of late-reveal mystery while the particulars are rather obvious. Director Tom Harper, after delivering a rousing actress showcase earlier this year with Wild Rose, can’t move aside from the film’s overzealous theatrics when it should be focusing on Jones’s performance. Of all the ways the film cuts even its simplest pleasures off at the knees, it’s how it fails Amelia that rankles the most.
That’s not hot air filling The Aeronauts for 100 lugubrious minutes, it’s just gassy.
Grade: D+