‘The Aeronauts’ or — I Get Up, I Get Down?
The story to ‘The Aeronauts’ (2019) is breathtaking simple: two people go up in a balloon; two people come down in a balloon. And that’s it. It’s as narratively light and insubstantial as the air at 30,000 feet.
Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones play two aeronauts who plan to ascend higher in a gas balloon than anyone else in history, not just for prestige but also the meteorological information to be gleaned from such a dangerous mission. However, in order to do so they need an absolute minimum load on board which means jettisoning anything of weight or substance from their basket, so first to go overboard are their personalities followed quickly by dramatic nuance, credible dialogue, a narrative arc, believability, historical fidelity, compelling story-telling or distinctive character traits, the only discernible difference between Redmayne and Jones characters being that Jones turns up in a dress. Freed from such weighty encumbrances they can soar upward into the heavens… and then come down again.
Fortunately this lack of dramatic ballast works in the movie’s favour because what we have here is, essentially, a Victorian version of ‘Gravity’ where it is simply an excuse to go on a high-altitude rollercoaster ride for ninety minutes. When ‘The Aeronauts’ sticks to that simple premise it works well — it’s tension and excitement and last minute escapes and all played out against the eye-poppingly gorgeous backdrop of blinding white and blue space. If you’re a sucker, like I am, for cloudscapes and high-altitude blue expanses then you’ll be happy just taking in the visuals alone.
The movie only gets bogged down when it feels the need to shove in elements of back-story so, unlike ‘Gravity’, the film keeps stopping and starting to give us flashbacks of Redmayne arguing with colleagues at The Royal Society or filling us in on a tragedy of Jones’ which, without ruining the surprise, consists of her husband making the single most idiotic decision in scientific history; if he’s going to do something THAT stupid then I’m not going to cry for the idiot. All this not only disrupts the flow but highlights how ludicrous a lot of this movie is, something that is even more compounded by the film wanting to stick to historical authenticity yet also play out like ‘The Right Stuff’ for toffs. There’s one scene in a dusty old drawing room that shot like an Apollo mission launch except if NASA was made entirely from wood, snuff and top-hats.
Then there’s Jones’ character who ends up doing stuff on the balloon that is super exciting but also correspondingly super silly. Maybe not as silly as some of the decisions Redmayne has made before the flight or the fact that Jones never bothered to ask him about any of this before launch but if this was brought up by the characters beforehand there’d be no movie, I’d guess. You’ll know it when it happens because you’ll be slapping your hand against your forehead until it bleeds.
Yet for all these issues, issues which could be a death sentence for other movies, ‘The Aeronauts’ does often reach the heights it is aiming for. It knows precisely what it is all about which is, to quote singer/song writer and I assume amateur aviation enthusiast Chris De Burgh, ‘the ecstasy of flight’ along with that Miyazaki wonder of cloud formations and the limitless cerulean blue. It was also refreshing to see a movie use its special effects to portray beauty against a panorama of strong aesthetics. When focusing on that ‘The Aeronauts’ manages to soar; it’s everything else that brings it thudding back to earth.
