Review of Amelia (2009) by Philip P — 07 Feb 2010

The story of Amelia Earhart is no doubt extremely interesting. I have thought it one of the great mysteries of this world since the first time I heard about it in grade school. It seems with this level of intrigue one could base a film on the pilots life and come out with nothing but a solid drama.

Especially when you employ such gifted actors as Hilary Swank and Richard Gere in the leads. Swank does a fine impression it seems and looks remarkably like the real Earhart and Gere does his natural charming thing.

The kicker here is, the movie is just slow. It looks gorgeous and it has a few bumps that we get interested in along the way, but we all know what this is building to and until we reach those last twenty minutes or so, we are kind of just coasting along as a viewer.

This probably looked like a serious award contender on paper-a bio pic with previous winners Swank and Gere as well as a big enough budget to pull off the time period. A lot seemed to be made of director Mira Nair whom Ive never heard of before, but she certainly has a good cinematographer here and really, it is not a hoorible film by any means, but in trying to base the core of the film around Earhart and Putnum's romance it just doesn't seem to work.

The chemistry isn't there and we don't feel the urge to care, we just want to see the inevitable. And once we get to the inevitable, the film is already over.