Amelia (2009)

Dreadfully Boring

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Women are not much into histories and documentaries and guys aren't much into romances. It took me a good 30-40 minutes before I could get into the film. Hilary Swank portrays Amelia as a woman who wanted to prove herself in a man's world, perhaps more to herself than to make a statement. She always wanted to test her boundaries, both as a pilot and in her personal life. After her early successes she was a "booth girl" marketing products and being asked questions about what she wore.The film covers the highlights of her life and includes her affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor) who perhaps makes a better leading man than Richard Gere. We do see some early foreboding as when Amelia crosses the Atlantic looking for Paris, lands in Ireland...now on her final trip around the world she has a navigator with a drinking problem and she needs to find a small island in the Pacific to refuel (something smaller than the European continent that she missed). Guess how that works out?The problem with this film is that they made it complex. It is a woman's story of achieving in a man's world. It is a love story. It is a romance. It is a history. But it wasn't an action film or a thriller.

Ultimately this is a very dull movie even with everything going for it. Beautiful cinematography, a brilliant performance from Hilary Swank who embodies Earhart (looks, voice, mannerisms) a nice blend of action and romance with some fine male leads in Richard Gere & Ewan McGregor.This should have been a great movie but was instead boring, pretentious even, with wasted potential of an interesting and intriguing historical figure and some great actors. I read a couple of reviews that described Amelia as "Oscar bait" and a "prestige picture" hoping for critical acclaim. That seems to hit the nail on he head.Amelia is a biopic, taking a look at the life of legendary American pilot Amelia Earhart, who disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 in an attempt to make a flight around the world. 9/7/13

If you are here to check out reviews of "Amelia" in the hope of a gripping cinematic adventure, please be warned to lower your expectations. My own proved far too high, founded on my longstanding admiration for the charismatic 1930s heroine of the skies and on a love of flying in old turboprop planes and noisy small aircraft whenever the chance arises, sidelining guilt about my bit part in aviation's major contribution to ozone depletion. Of course Amelia Earhart was free of today's environmental worries, with great distances topping her list of challenges.When I heard that the dependable and gifted Hilary Swank had been cast in the star role, my hopes soared with a feeling that she would be perfect for the part like the smart, spunky and enthusiastic all-American girl she seems to be. And excellent she is. I had doubts about Richard Gere in the role of the publisher who becomes Earhart's fund-raising promoter and more. My prejudice was unfairly based on a period when I sat through someone's young appetite for some of the sloppiest high romance movies ever endured. Back then, Gere then seemed omnipresent and utterly beyond credibility and I started avoiding his films!But years pass. In fact, Gere does very well in the role of the patient and increasingly affectionate George P. Putnam, while Ewan McGregor is good as the commercial flight pioneer Gene Vidal. He also becomes part of a love triangle, testified to by his son Gore. Equally worthy of mention are Cherry Jones in a cameo part as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Christopher Eccleston as Amelia's navigator Fred Noonan on her final ill-fated bid to be the first woman to fly round the world.Amelia lifts us off the ground in the lengthy flight sequences in Mira Nair's film, the parts I usually enjoyed the most. We are granted the spectacular views that any airborne movie should dish up, with some splendid photography and a taste of the thrill of the rides across different oceans between continents. And when Earhart succeeds in her accomplishments, we see the ticker-tape parades and meet younger female fliers whom she does her best to encourage in a man's world.So what's so disappointing about "Amelia"? It's hard to pin down precisely, but to start with both script and direction are serviceable but pedestrian, failing fully to flesh out some key characters and at least sustain constant interest. The very worst of the film, after spells of boredom despite valiant efforts by the actors, concerns the last known hours of Earhart's short life, which make for a missed opportunity.The aviator is world famous for attempting the almost impossible, risking all on a bid to complete her planetary tour by landing on tiny Howland Island in the Pacific to refuel and fly on to coastal America. If any true-life exploit shown on screen should generate a sense of action and high adventure, that was the biggest in Earhart's career, but Nair's movie falls regrettably short of the reality.True, the film-makers portray in some detail one of the controversial accounts of the fatal communications breakdown between Amelia's Lockheed Elektra and the USS Itasca moored off Howland, which led to the disappearance of the aircraft. Yet hardly any real tension builds up in these climactic scenes aboard plane and ship. The cast seems all but abandoned to make their best of a bad job, not for the first time, which I blame on script flaws and unadventurous direction.Maybe Nair tried to plod her way too close to all the details she and the producers knew to be accurate, without venturing into a little creative licence to raise the dramatic stakes. But when I rate her film 6/10, that's an acknowledgement of the background research and of factors such as the acting and some striking sets. These mean I am ready to see it more than once while wishing it could have been much more exciting, like Earhart's life often was.I get a far bigger emotional punch from listening to Heather Nova singing "I Miss My Sky (Amelia Earhart's Last Days)" on her "Redbird" album than I did from that last act of the film. Nobody knows what really happened to Amelia and Fred, but legends persist that they did manage to land somewhere unknown. Nova's allegorical lyrics imply by conjecture that the aircraft was out of fuel or a write-off.After all, in the film Earhart and Noonan do indeed land in places as yet unknown! Location titles solemnly inform viewers that they are in Pakistan, which did not exist until 1947, a decade after their global circumnavigation attempt, and also set them down in Mali, which was then no nation but a part of sprawling French West Africa. But these are quibbles.For all my reservations, I recommend "Amelia" not only to die-hard Earhart fans who will certainly be able to recognize her in Swank's well-prepared performance, but also to a broader audience that might be interested in a movie about a succession of some of the most daring aviation exploits of all time. Like I said, the film does manage to fly - but mainly when it's already airborne.

Even two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank can't elevate "Amelia" much above the level of the standard great-person-of-history biopic. Amelia Earhart was, of course, the pioneer aviator who became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, and who, in 1937, met a tragic fate when she and her navigator Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston) disappeared over the Pacific in a failed attempt to be the first pilot to ever circumnavigate the globe.Swank certainly looks the part of the famed flyer, and she has the voice and mannerisms down pat as well. The problem is that the screenplay by Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan (from the novels "East to the Dawn" and "The Sound of Wings") doesn't provide the actress with the opportunity to delve much beneath the surface of the character. For all Swank's efforts at mimicry, Earhart stubbornly remains a cardboard cutout of a woman who refused to allow the society around her to dictate what she, or any woman for that matter, could and could not do, and who lived life to the fullest, even though she wound up paying the ultimate price for it.Even her long-term relationship with and eventual marriage to book publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere) and her brief dalliance with pilot and future Federal Aviation administrator Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor) come across as standard-issue melodrama, executed without flair or passion.The movie is at its most interesting when it's concentrating on the early history of aviation and the part Earhart herself played in it. A brief scene in which Earhart takes Eleanor Roosevelt on a night-flight over Washington D.C. is a rare moment when the movie itself actually manages to soar above the earthbound histrionics. And the flight scenes themselves are, as one would expect, visually stimulating and emotionally captivating.But low-wattage performances, pedestrian direction (a real shock coming from the highly gifted Mira Nair) and conventional storytelling (it's all done in the form of a huge book-ended flashback, of course) keep "Amelia" from truly taking flight.