The Aeronauts (Dir Tom Harper, 1h 40m)

On 5 September 1862, meterologist James Glaisher and aeronaut Henry Tracey Coxwell, already veterans of high-altitude balllooning, attempted the impossible; to break the thirty year plus record for flight altitude, whilst attempting to find out more about the atmosphere. Whilst their record of 35,000 feet (nearly 7 miles high), stood for 40 years (and still stands in terms of oxygenless ascents), their discovery was even more impactful upom the nascent field of metereology. The Aeronauts, whilst recounting that pioneering flight with impressive visuals and a tautening plot, unfortunately is too small scale, too surface-detail, and most glaringly, too revisionist with its history.

Beginning with a flashback to the loss of her husband, the film then jumps back to Felicity Jones' Amelia Rennes, an aeronaut and daredevil, as she prepares to take to the skies once more, this time accompanied by Glaisher, who intends to use the ascent to prove his beliefs that the weather can be predicted, with both given the additional, and clearly dangerous task of beating the previously set French record. As they ascend, through a thunderstorm, till they reach above the clouds and begin to slowly soar towards what Glaisher would eventually discover as the stratosphere, so the film begins to go into their backstories

Rennes, for her part, is a neatly told tale, in which she attempts to be a strong and confident female in a male-dominated sphere in which she is seen to be little more than entertainiment and eyecandy, deal with the loss of her husband, and generally proves herself to be every inch the match of any male aeronaut. Jones manages all three of these with equal neatness, from her initial reluctance, and clear grief at the death of her husband leading her to lock herself away, to her surprisingly tough performance throughout the highest moments of tension, dragging herself atop, and across a frozen balloon, in scenes that recall the toughest moments of 2003 Touching the Void, with an evocative viscerality.

The problem is, that around Jones' performance, the rest of the film is messy at best, boring at worst, and much of it has to do with those four little words Inspired by True Events. And this, unfortunately, is where the real Henry Coxwell and the imagined Amelia Rennes prove the biggest problem, for Rennes, despite her basis on actual aeronauts, is entirely fictitious, and her appearance in the film comes at the cost of the real hero of Glaisher's quest for knowledge, Cox, in what I'm going to dub, for obvious reason, the Patch Adams effect. It's not that basing a film upon true events but taking creative liberties with various characters is anything new-hell, one of my favourite films, The Revenant does so with ease, but changing a character's gender just to get a cheap bit of narrative development seems especially questionable.

It's an understandable bit of cinematic screenwriting-even if the rest of the structure of the film remained, retaining Coxwell would strip out the dual sense of two outsiders proving themselves, regardless of their status, expertise, or indeed, sex-but even as it is, The Aeronauts feels like a docudrama accidently given a $40 million budget, despite every effort that Jones makes to keep this film in the air. Most of these problems come from, for a film that spends almost all of its time in a basket and a balloon, its lack of character development, instead bouncing off into their intial attempts to deal with their challenges, and then their slow-moving attempts to get this expedition underway.

As a result, there's little character development outside of these scenes, and one is left with a thumbnail sketch of both characters; Redmayne, for his part, goes into affable earnest but sheltered mode within minutes of the film starting and never truly leaves it,. As a result, the film leans even more heavily into what character development there is, in the backstory scenes, rather than trying to develop our heroes at present, as their ascent throws more and more dangers at them-though these are excellently shot, they feel, in places, like set-dressing a children's nativity with things borrowed from the Old Vic. It's too little too late

The Aeronauts, of course, being a streaming product first, feels like a film that Amazon have let out into the multiplexes just long enough to pick up some Oscar nods before being dumped onto streaming to be watched in bite-size chunks. But, as The Irishman, and other films like it are beginning to show, the bar is being steadily raised, and The Aeronauts with its weak acting, generic plot, and historical revisionism, is simply not good enough. Rather than soar, it sinks, makes an embarressing noise, and crashes out of view.

Rating: Avoid