Les Aéronautes

I watched this on Amazon Prime streaming. While it was inspired by a real person, James Glaisher who set the early groundwork for understanding and predicting weather, the story told here is a highly fictionalized account of his 1862 ascent by balloon to perhaps 36,000 feet.

Felicity Jones as the fictional pilot and Eddie Redmayne as James Glaisher are both good. Being a scientist myself I was a bit put off by such things as climbing the exterior of the balloon at above 30,000 feet where the air temperature would be somewhere between -50 and -65F, and without gloves! What is depicted here is fantasy.

But what about the good? The production values are high and the action interesting. Plus how many have even heard of Glaisher and his pioneering meteorological studies at a time when other British scientists laughed at him? He was a very important scientist in the history of weather forecasting and contributed to changing the world.

So yeah, it has lots of things it can be legitimately criticized for but still it is an entertaining movie if you are in the right mood. I mostly enjoyed it.