Film review: ‘The Aeronauts’

‘The Aeronauts’ is surely one of the foremost thrillers ever made about the invention of meteorology.|

“The Aeronauts” is surely one of the foremost thrillers ever made about the invention of meteorology. The film takes place in London in 1862 and the British have two goals: to best the French for the greatest height reached in a balloon and to discover if weather patterns can be predicted from high altitudes.

Jaunty but haunted balloon captain Amelia Rennes (Felicity Jones) agrees to take scientist James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) 25,000-plus feet in the air. Initially she finds Mr. Glaisher rather cold, as he’s booksmart while she’s streetsmart. Or rather airsmart.

As the balloon ascends, James is still smarting because the Royal Society fuddy duddies laughed him off the stage for saying he could predict the weather. While we feel for his wounded pride, it’s fair to mention that he refuses to postpone the ascent even as a storm cloud builds directly over the launching ground. He says, “Instinct has no place in weather prediction,” but perhaps looking directly over his head would have been wise.

After a dicey journey between lightning bolts, Amelia and James escape above cloud level and turn to loftier pursuits. They recite a couple verses from Edmund Spenser’s “The Fate of the Butterflie” and, wouldn’t you know it, suddenly butterflies float across the stratosphere.

The whole script, by Jack Thorne, lacks creativity. It’s infected with bombastic monologues when it would have been tastier rethought as a survival film at heights never before reached by man. Director Tom Harper tries for breathless immediacy with fish-eyed closeups in the balloon, but they are ill-matched to the film’s ponderous pacing.

While most of the action happens between Amelia and Jack, there are some flashbacks to the characters’ dull backstories. We glimpse James’s colleague John Trew (Himesh Patel with a looking glass in his eye) and Amelia’s deceased husband Pierre (Vincent Perez), who fell out of a balloon to his death.

Otherwise it’s a two-person show between two people with decidedly asexual chemistry. Rather than take Amelia’s temperature, James checks the barometer and scribbles in his notebook. Whenever she’s irritated with him, “Return to your instruments,” is her cool instruction, extinguishing any hint of hot air hanky panky.

With “Rogue One” and “On the Basis of Sex,” Jones seems intent on winning the coveted “Most Plucky” designation in her yearbook. Redmayne, who is usually capable of a committed and/or ridiculous performance, plays it safe here. Even while growing woozy with high altitude hypoxia, James still attempts to note the atmospheric conditions. The exciting moments - as when Amelia shows impressive core strength for a Victorian and scales the balloon to assist their downward flight - are few and far between. As the film plummets back to earth, we mostly wonder why Amelia’s dog got its own parachute while the humans have to do without.

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