‘The Aeronauts’ loses some of its wonder on the small screen

Posted on January 3, 2020

By MARK VIOLA

Not every new film I saw over the holidays was in a movie theater. Although Amazon is better than Netflix in releasing its movies nationwide as opposed to in an extremely limited number of theaters, one of the online streamer’s more anticipated 2019 films, “The Aeronauts,” never found its way to a movie theater near us. But, the film is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime.

That’s really a shame, because “The Aeronauts,” was made to be a visual spectacle, and no matter how big or expensive your television is, the experience of watching a movie at home will never equal that of sitting in a theater seeing a new film with a audience.

The film follows the mostly true story of an 1862 scientific endeavor to fly a balloon higher than any human had ever flown before. I say “mostly true” because while the trip did happen mostly as depicted in the film (with some dramatic flourishes, I’m sure) and did include scientist James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”), the movie features the fictional Amelia Rennes (Felicity Jones, “Rogue One”) as the pilot.

In the real-life trip, the pilot was Henry Coxwell, while Rennes is a combination of a number of pilots, both male and female, who took to the skies in those pioneering days.

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