Delayed Reaction: The Aeronauts

Premise: In the 1800s, a hot air balloon pilot and a scientist attempt to break the elevation record and collect valuable data without realizing the full effects of a lack of oxygen.

While I like the idea of seeing lots of combinations of actors and casting the people who are best for the role over just picking the biggest names, I do wish more actors who work well together would form partnerships. Comedies are great about doing this. While I haven't liked an Adam Sandler Happy Madison production in a while, it is nice to know which familiar faces will show up in them. I love the “Apatow crew” who seem to be playing to each other as much as they are to the audience. If Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone made a movie together every other year, it would take a long time for me to get tired of it. The better that performers get to know each other, the better they can play off each other. It's the same idea behind sports teams needing to build chemistry before they can maximize their performance in the game.

Naturally, the most exciting thing for me about The Aeronauts was seeing Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne paired together again. It’s a much different movie than The Theory of Everything and their dynamic is unrecognizable. But dammit, I just like seeing those two paired up.

This movie is a little thin. It's mainly about two people trapped in a hot air balloon. Their flight only takes a couple hours. That's really not a lot of time to have a full emotional arc, given that they spend half the time with oxygen deprivation. The action can be summed up as "what comes up, must come down". I was a little disappointed to learn that the Felicity Jones character wasn't based on a real person and this specific flight was really rooted in history. Obviously, if I think about it for even a half-second, of course this was going to be wildly dramatized. There's been exactly one exciting real hot air balloon story ever, and that was the Hindenburg disaster, which I'm not even sure counts.

The movie does everything right that it can though. It keeps a pretty lean runtime, realizing there's no reason this should ever flirt with being 2 hours long. They mix in enough backstory to explain the character motivations. They don't force Jones and Redmayne into a romance. They uses the space on the air balloon well. The visual effects around it are solid. They even manage to explain the physics of the balloon without it ever sounding like an exposition dump. It may have been foolish for people to ever think this would be an awards player, but it's a fun little movie.

One silly detail I sarcastically loved was the half-hearted attempt to explain the scientific importance of the voyage. Redmayne jots a few notes down in a notebook and is like "I scienced so good that I can prove that the atmosphere has layers. Layers, I tell you! Hooray for science!" I don't know much about the atmosphere, or science in general if I'm being honest, but I know enough to find the lack of scientific rigor in this adorable.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend