Very Cool!!!

A Masterpiece!

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

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.

This film bio-picture of the aviatrix Amelia Earhart (Hillary Swank) tries to be too much, treading a line between historical representation and mythic representation without managing to succeed on either count. There's nothing to fault in Swank's performance -- although her chemistry with the typically lazy Richard Gere (as her husband, GP) is basically not there -- but the film manages to bring the famous flier down to earth, without restoring any of our hopes or interest in her. Why, for example, does the film labor so hard to establish her relationship with Gene Vidal, and indeed with his son Gore Vidal (the famous crochety old liberal writer of later years), and indeed further still with a young female aviatrix, simply to let these threads drop without resolution? Everything in the film's treatment is typical -- right to the score that sounds like John Williams 101, you know, big sweeping strings followed 2.5 seconds later by thumping oboes -- and nothing about the director's style is lyrical. The film is hurt, in my opinion, by CGI treated flight images that do not portray real images of flying. In this respect it is inferior even to lame melodramatic bio-pictures like Billy Wilder's Lindberg pic "Spirit of St. Louis." If the film had attempted to treat Earhart in a mythic way like Wilder's film did for Lindberg, it might be laughable. But, if it had gone all the way to a real depiction of this woman as a mediocre pilot whose fame was largely manufactured -- as, indeed, the film does hint -- then it might have been fascinating but offensive to the legions of Earhart fanboys. Instead the film comes off as half-baked, touching both territories but never committing itself. It is a remarkably cowardly film about a woman whose courage, whatever her other faults, could not and should not be doubted.A typical error in the film -- Gore Vidal is introduced as "Gore", and Amelia remarks, "What an unusual name for a boy." Indeed, it would be an unusual name for a boy, but his name was actually Gene Vidal Jr. He only started calling himself "Gore", in tribute to his grandfather the Senator, later when he was serving in WWII. It's a small error, but it is telling -- as if the film wants to telegraph to us that "hey, this is Gore Vidal!", but to what purpose? Those who know enough about Vidal realize that he was not called "Gore" as a boy, and so the film immediately strikes a false note. Those who do not know, probably don't really care about "Gore Vidal", and therefore why should the film go out of the way to give them a history lesson? Particularly an inaccurate one? I thought this flaw was typical of the middling approach of the film itself to fact and fiction, to truth and myth. Why bother telling any of the truth, if you're going to tell it in such a half-assed way? Although the film gives us a nice image of Earhart as portrayed convincingly by Swank, there is no compelling reason for anybody to watch this film.

As a lover of vintage aircraft and aviation history, I enjoyed the movie for that reason alone. As far as I can tell, the movie pretty much held true to the known facts, for the most part. Some things were exaggerated, some understated, but basically factual, to the best of my knowledge. The vintage aircraft were amazingly beautiful. To me, anyway.For most people this will seem like nitpicking, but speaking of facts, the original description by jotix100 had an error in it. Gene Vidal was a director of NorthEAST Airlines, not NorthWEST Airlines (Col. Lewis H. Brittin was the founder of Northwest). In doing a Google search to find the source of that error, I found about an equal number of references to Vidal via-a-vis Northeast and Northwest. It's apparent to me that "somebody, somewhere, sometime" made a transcription error that got perpetuated. It seems misinformation usually travels faster than actual facts.

A solid, if sometimes stolid biopic of a remarkable woman who probably deserved a slightly stronger treatment than is delivered here.. "Amelia" is beautifully set and features as you would expect some excellent aerial photography but falls down somewhat in the dramatic stakes.Hilary Swank bears a strong physical resemblance to the title character, but for me doesn't quite convey the passion and drive which inspired Earhart's exploits. The dialogue also is occasionally too florid, particularly between Earhart and her husband, Putnam, played by a too-old Richard Gere giving us some more of that razzle-dazzle, always looking for the main chance. Euan McGregor however seems miscast as the other romantic interest, Gene Vidal, father of writer Gore as the screenplay seems determined to make us realise. Christopher Ecclestone is wasted in his relatively small part as Earhart's last navigator (she didn't die alone) and could conceivably have played the McGregor part to greater benefit.There is some interesting interpolation of vintage footage of Earhart herself and some neat transitions from black and white to colour to take us into the movie, but mostly the direction is unspectacular and episodic. The obvious comparison here is to Scorcese's "The Aviator", his biopic of Earhart's contemporary Howard Hughes. Yes, Hughes' eventful life gave Scorcese more to work with,but his film really grabbed you by the scruff of the neck and kept you on the edge of your seat, whereas this movie felt more like something you'd watch on the National Geographic channel.All that said, immediately after watching the film, I was inspired to read up on the aviator's life, but maybe that too is a sign that the movie hadn't quite done its job in encapsulating the life and times of its remarkable subject.My summary quote, by the way, is from Joni Mitchell's great song "Amelia" on her "Hejira" album.