This is an idea of alternative history. So the filmmakers decided to change a famous story of 2 old men in a balloon surviving a disaster to a male researcher and a female pilot surviving a greater disaster. I pretty much dislike all such pointless historical changes in movies. It's also a big disservice to women who actually did fulfil crucial roles during this flight and you could have had important wives, moms, emotional support roles here for actual historical women instead of putting a random historical woman from another time into this setting. It would actually be a huge service to history to depict real people doing what they did in history.
But I love science and history so I was interested in this movie anyhow. Also, it makes sense for a filmmaker to want to put an attractive actress into a balloon with a geeky scientist as you can create quite a potent romance subplot this way. Of course it has to be done right for the weird ahistorical decision to make any sense and unfortunately it's done badly for several reasons.
Firstly, the camera work is terrible much of the time. The balloon scenes have the camera flying around the characters as they are trying to create "action" by never keeping the camera steady. This shows how little they trust the plot, actors and story to deliver entertainment by itself. The director clearly felt the story was boring and needed some fake action this way. Which shows lack of director abilities.
The acting is terrible at times. The ahistorical change needed to make sense so there needed to be a strong connection between the 2 leads. Instead we get a male nerd character with bad acting. And as the guy is supposed to be autistic in some ways there is no connection to the attractive and charming female in his balloon. The scenes between them just feel off and weird as they stare at each other for long periods of time, but never seem to make any real connection. Not on a friendship or romantic level. They just seem to be in their own heads or bicker/make up. This also shows that the change to a female character unfortunately backfired in big ways as it made it all way more weird. Which is unfortunate because there is a strong story here somewhere they just didn't find. It also doesn't work that the man gets them into this huge trouble and she lets him. This makes it all feel like they were just being fools and deserved to suffer a bit.
There is also a friend sidekick character. He is the token minority character in this historical setting that lacked these people. An Indian researcher. He is actually very good and believable and his scenes work well. Then there is the sister who also is fairly good, but unfortunately her scenes largely consist of her whining and wanting her balloon sister to remarry. Which is fine it's just not that fascinating. It's all very fake "big research" stuff and the dialogues about how important the flight is are nonsensical bragging about "changing the world".
Then of course there is the HUGE issue of narration. The story leading up to the flight is told via random flashback scenes. So the first scene is them going up and then we have A TON of flashback sequences. You already know they found the money for it. So having half of the movie being about finding the money and courage for something that is already happening is rather pointless. Flashbacks rarely work well in movies and of course they don't work here, but at least those scenes are properly filmed and acted unlike the intolerable balloon scenes that can feel like nails on a chalkboard with the overly dramatic fake acting and creepy "friendship" where you feel like the man may at any point attack the woman. Which he of course does do at one point, but she uses words to calm him down - luckily for her it works otherwise he'd have killed them both. Also, the brilliant filmmakers decided that flashbacks were the way to go to tell her background story. So it's flashback disaster class.
Messy ahistorical movie. But the idea is really cool and the ahistorical setting could work if the writers were better. I don't trust the filmmakers or writers to make anything better. But the idea could for sure work in a remake. There is a certain charm in the idea I really adore. But I have to give it a 5 because overall it's dull and I wanted to shut it off at the end.
