Eye Candy #406 - "Amelia"

Amelia:  What should have been a great movie about famed aviator Amelia Earhart just based on the quality of the cast alone is undone by a weak script.  Focusing directly on Amelia’s (Hilary Swank) marriage to her husband, publicist and publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere), and  affair with Gene Vidal (played by Ewan McGregor), in arguably the world‘s least torrid affair ever, the film starts roughly around the time of her first successful attempt to cross the Atlantic through various other exploits, while framing the entire picture within the context of her final flight over the Pacific, the last leg of her around-the-world flight where she and her navigator Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston) disappeared into history.   The script is emotionally remote - Earhart is more famous today for disappearing than for being the trailblazer she was during her lifetime.  So if your main character is more famous, presently, for being dead, then you have to do something to showcase her life other than just run through various events with little fanfare.   We are as distant from Earhart at the end as we were at the beginning.  No emotional punch at all.  And let’s be honest - unless you’re being shot at, flying is boring to watch, particularly long distance flying over large bodies of water.  Woodchuck sez, “Disappointing.”