The Aeronauts

Dir. Tom Harper | UK 2019 | 100 mins | PG

Visually wondrous, with charismatic performances from the stars of The Theory of Everything, The Aeronauts takes to the skies and soars.

Eddie Redmayne stars as nineteenth-century real-life meteorologist James Glaisher in this Victorian ballooning adventure. The pioneering Glaisher wants to prove to his stuffy, mutton-chopped Royal Society colleagues that predicting weather is a science. If only he could get up to a decent height in one of those impossibly dangerous hot-air balloons he could take some serious atmospheric readings. 

So, he finds daredevil balloon pilot Amelia Wren (a fictional character played by Felicity Jones) and her little pilot dog (complete with parachute) and, under the guise of an attempt to break the world record for the highest-flying balloon, the reckless voyage is launched.