Mediocre balloon tale struggles to take off
Hot air balloons are magical things, fragile looking bubbles that defy gravity with little more than stitched silk and hope. A film about its pioneers, the first people to test human endurance at altitude, should be a giddy delight. Unfortunately, this fictionalised take on a famous flight gives us spectacle without substance, floating out of the memory as soon as it passes off the screen.
It all looked so good on paper. Eddie Redmayne stars as (real-life) Victorian meteorologist James Glaisher. It is 1862, and in this account, Glaisher is an idealistic youth taking on the science establishment with his radical notions that weather could be forecast if only we had a better understanding of the upper atmosphere. Balloons provide the tool that he needs to climb high enough to find out, but as a non-expert, he recruits (fictional) aeronaut and grieving widow Amelia Wren (Felicity Jones) for his mission.
The pair aim to beat the altitude records previously set by a French team and to return with the scientific data Glaisher needs – as well as a new record for Wren. Instead, they become two of the first humans to enter the high-altitude “death zone” of thin air and freezing temperatures, in a battle for survival five miles up.
Their struggles in the stratosphere might have worked as the backbone to a thrilling adventure film, but unfortunately this drama keeps flashing away from their voyage to focus on the less exciting steps that brought them to this flight. Glaisher fights to convince his colleagues that meteorology is more than a pipe dream, while coming to terms with the losing battle against Alzheimer’s being fought by his father (Tom Courtenay).
Meanwhile, Wren has to be dragged out of a depressive episode following her husband’s death, and must overcome the lingering fear of heights caused by his loss. Neither strand is particularly compelling or wellwritten, and, frankly, you’d rather they talked it out in the balloon.
It’s also faintly nonsensical if you know any aeronautical history. Glaisher was 53 when he made the historic 1862 flight that is the basis for this film, and a garlanded academic rather than a plucky outsider. His companion, meanwhile, was the daring Henry Tracey Coxwell rather than a showboating girl who is somehow both a carnival performer and – in one of the script’s less believable concoctions – a close relation to the landed aristocracy.
Yet, a few historical liberties might be permissible if the dynamic between the ambitious scientist and emotionally scarred pilot was more, well, dynamic.
Instead, Redmayne and Jones both feel like they’re treading water in overly familiar roles: he the awkward intellectual and she the feisty, capable trailblazer. There will inevitably be comparisons with their previous team-up in The Theory of Everything, and they won’t flatter this film.
At least the Cg-assisted visuals of the balloon flight are breathtaking, with snow flurries, storm clouds and pastel skies sweeping past majestically as they rise. There are hair-raising moments too: vertigo sufferers will want to look away as Wren clambers up the outside surface of the balloon, hanging on frostbitten fingers as far from the ground as the peak of Mount Everest.
If only the story matched those panoramas, instead of freezing even as the high altitude threatens to freeze both the balloon and Glaisher (who neglects to bring a coat).
It’s a particularly disappointing misfire given that director Tom Harper’s last film, Glasgow-set country music drama Wild Rose, was so fresh and energetic, with such a vibrant lead at its heart.
We know that this cast can produce magic together, and that this director can inject pace into unlikely topics.
It’s just this one that seems to have feet of clay.
On general release from Nov 8