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Redmayne and Jones go up, up and away in The Aeronauts |
Director: Tom Harper
Cast: Felicity Jones (Amelia Rennes), Eddie Redmayne (James
Glaisher), Himesh Patel (John Trew), Tom Courtenay (Arthur Glaisher), Phoebe
Fox (Antonia), Vincent Perez (Pierre Wren), Anne Reid (Ethel Glaisher), Rebecca
Front (Aunt Frances), Tim McInnerny (Sir George Airy), Robert Glenister (Ned
Chambers), Thomas Arnold (Charles Green)
When you have found two actors with such natural and easy
chemistry as Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne, it makes sense that you would
seek other projects for them to star together in. Let’s try and recapture that Theory of Everything magic in the
bottle! The Aeronauts brings these
two actors back together, but the law of diminishing returns applies in this
impressively mounted but rather uninvolving epic that has more in common with Gravity that it does Theory of Everything.
James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) is a scientist, one of the
first meteorologists, determined to prove that man can predict the weather.
While his theories are laughed at by fellow members of the Royal Society,
Glaisher raises the cash for a private balloon trip to the heavens to take
meteorological readings. But he needs a pilot: who better than Amelia Rennes
(Felicity Jones) a famous balloonist and show-woman, the widow of a fellow
balloonist (Vincent Perez) who fell to his death in an attempt to break the
record ascent. Will the two mismatched aeronauts – the uptight scientist and
the freespirit with tragedy at her core – reach an understanding amongst the clouds?
If you got the sense that the story of the film is rather
predictable from that paragraph well… you’d be right. It’s the sort of film
that has bookend scenes: an early one where our hero desperately tries to make
himself heard during a speech at the Royal Society while his colleagues walk
out in contemptuous laughter, and then another near the end with the same hero
being applauded to the rafters by those same colleagues. Even his harshest
critic claps politely – because it’s that sort of film. Meanwhile our other
hero overcomes her survivor guilt by heading into the skies. Whenever the
story, written by workaholic Jack Thorne, focuses on these personal stories,
the film falters into cliché and dull predictability.
It’s told mostly in real time, following the just over 1
hour and 40 minutes of the pair’s ascent in the balloon, with flashbacks to
their first meeting and their own backstories plugging the gaps in conversation.
No major revelations happen in these flashback sequences, and a host of
respected actors go through the motions, filling in the paint-by-numbers
stories of bereavement, scientific isolation, an inspirational father with
early onset dementia, and pressures to just conform to what women are expected
to do. The two leads do their very best to animate these rather dull and tired
plotlines but with very little success.
In fact, both actors are largely struggling the whole time
to add breadth and depth to thinly sketched characters. Tom Harper leans
heavily on their pre-existing chemistry and there is certainly very little in
the characters to challenge them, particularly Redmayne who can play these
stiff-necked, all-business, shy science types standing on his head. Felicity
Jones has by far the better part as a natural adventuress who has locked
herself in isolation and guilt (and in a dress) due to her guilt at her
husband’s death. Jones gets the best material – and also the best vertigo
inducing action sequences – in a film that is most successful when it is far
away from the ground.
Harper’s film is by far at its most interesting when extreme
altitudes, cold temperatures and reduced oxygen induce crisis in the balloon’s
ascent. As Amelia has to go to extreme and dangerous lengths in order to force
the balloon to begin its descent, the film finally comes to life. With several
terrifying shots of the huge drop to the ground (they certainly made me squirm
in my seat) and a compelling feat of bravery and physical endurance to force
the balloon to start releasing gas (combined with some horrifyingly close slips
and falls) the film works best from this moment of crisis, through to the
hurried and panicked attempt of both aeronauts to control the descent of the
balloon safely to the ground. The sense of two people struggling with the very
outer reaches of mankind’s connection to the Earth – and their terrifying
distance from the safety of the ground – really brings Gravity to mind far more than any other film.
It’s a shame then that I came away from the film to find
most of it is not true. Glaisher did take to the skies – but with a male
companion, Henry Coxwell. Amelia Rennes never existed (and most of the events
in the sky never happened), although she is heavily based on a real female
aeronaut and professional balloonist who had no connection with Glaisher or
science. It shouldn’t really matter, but it kind of does as the film doubles
down on Glaisher’s tribute to Rennes at the Roya Society and its general
attitude of female pioneers in science. As one critic said: there were genuine
pioneering women in science, why not make a film about one of them?
But it’s an only a minor problem really for a film that is
impressively made when it is in the air, but dull and uninvolving when it is on
the ground. At heart it’s an experience film – you can imagine as one of those
immersive rides at Disney it would be amazing – but as a piece of storytelling
it’s dull, predictable and uninvolving and largely fails to make the science
that was supposed to be at the heart of it clear or significant. Jones and
Redmayne do their best but this story never really takes flight (boom boom
toosh).
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