We haven’t had a good balloon disaster movie in awhile. Amazon is here to fix that.
“Inspired by true events,” The Aeronauts tells the story of James Glaisher’s recordbreaking ascent in the hot-air balloon Mammoth in September 1862. Glaisher (played in the film by Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything) and his copilot, Henry Coxwell, may have reached as high as 37,000 feet, but both men lost consciousness well before that. For the film, Coxwell’s character has been replaced by a female pilot, Amelia Wren (Theory of Everything costar Felicity Jones).
The film appears to have a standard disaster-movie structure: Introduce the protagonists and the people who are against them, show the main characters bravely going on, and then have Things Go Wrong. The visuals are stunning; according to Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke, “The Aeronauts is a spectacular film … The level of filmmaking is nothing short of a technical feat that transports you to another world high up in the clouds.” Just from the trailer, if you’ve got a fear of heights, you might want to skip this one.
The film was written by Jack Thorne (His Dark Materials) and directed and produced by Tom Harper (Peaky Blinders). Todd Lieberman and David Hoberman of Mandeville Films are also producers, with Richard Hewitt and Thorne as executive producers. The cast also includes Tom Courtenay (45 Years), Anne Reid (The Last Tango in Halifax), Rebecca Front (The Thick of It), Vincent Perez (Riviera), Tim McInnerny (Peterloo), Phoebe Fox (Eye in the Sky), and Himesh Patel (Yesterday).
The Aeronauts will be released in theaters on December 6 and available on Amazon Prime Video on December 20, just making the deadlines for awards season.
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