I thought THE AVIATOR was terrific! DiCaprio (whom I don’t particularly care fo) was amazing. . . his best role since Romeo in ROMEO + JULIET. (I never saw GILBERT GRAPE.) And who knew he had such brilliantly blue eyes?
I am still amazed by the Beverly Hills crash scene. It seemed to take forever and was just horrific. Wow!
The costumes were fabulous, too! Really loved Ava Gardner’s outlandish hats!
Cate Blanchett deserves at least an Oscar nomination for her Katharine Hepburn.
But I am still wondering if we’re supposed to blame Howard’s obsessive- compulsive behavior on his mother? If so, is there any scientific basis to moms causing OCD?
I had the same problem with it that I have with any bio-pic. . .there’s just not a continuous narrative for me to grab onto. There were major threads running throughout it, but it still doesn’t get beyond just being a series of events in a man’s life.
As opposed to some of you, I really liked Alan Alda, but I didn’t like Cate Blanchett very much. It just seemed too phony – maybe that’s because she was playing someone who was larger than life and so familiar to us. Her role seemed too “studied” and too “acted”. She seemed so corny on that golf course, strutting off with the club on her shoulder. It just rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t really get anything out of that except she played a character, and when she was with Di Caprio, it seemed like two big cartoons up on screen.
On the other hand, I thought Kate Beckinsale brought a lot to her role (as Gardner) and brought more out of the Hughes character. More than Blanchett, she represented reality and through that, she helped show the inability of Hughes to function normally. I wish they spent more time on their relationship than the Hughes-Hepburn romance.
But, overall, I liked the movie a lot. It held my interest easily for 3 hours. I wasn’t as fully entertained as I was for Gangs of New York or Goodfellas but it was still superb. I look forward to watching it again when it comes out on DVD.
Loved it, loved it, loved it. Even the parts that weren’t about airplanes
I didn’t think DiCaprio could come near pulling this off, but I have to reconsider - this man has major chops. I too never thought I was seeing an actor playing a role; I was seeing Hughes.
Props for a historically-accurate script (by Hollywood standards, that is) - the movie could have easily been 10 hours long if Scorsese’d done Hughes’ entire life. The OCD scenes may have been anachronistic - during the period the movie covered, he was by all accounts much less affected by it than later on. But DiCaprio made them all believable.
The major screen names doing all those minor roles somehow all seemed a bit stilted for some reason, as if they were too conscious of the mannerisms of the famous people they were playing. That wasn’t Hepburn but somebody doing a cocktail-party Hepburn impersonation, same for Errol Flynn, etc. But no matter.
The advances of CGI in recent years have been remarkable, but there’s still work to be done. The WW1 planes in the background in the “Hell’s Angels” shoot, and the takeoff of the Hercules, were just a bit off for me. They still looked like models from a Fifties flick. The XF-11 crash seemed slightly overindulgent, too.
But it never dragged for a moment, not even after 3 hours. Oscars all around, bartender!
He clicked for me when he got the facial scars and the moustache after the near-fatal crash. Till then, he seemed young and kind of callow to me, in the way modern actors do when you put them up against actors of an earlier day.
I found Blanchett’s Hepburn believable in a different way, as a very private, maybe somewhat stilted, free spirit like Hughes himself (who was nothing if not stilted in real life). I stopped worrying about how accurate her impression was )it was accurate enough) and merely enjoyed her as a strong and singular woman. That came across loud and clear.
Really…I’ve heard it called the greatest plane crash in movie history. YMMV. It did give me an unusually vivid flavor of what it’s actually like to crash a plane, or have it tear your roof off.
As a vintage plane nut myownself, I really appreciated the love of aircraft that was evident. I didn’t expect to enjoy the rest of The Aviator as much as I did. The 3 hours and 10 minutes passed surprisingly fast. That, these days, is praise enough.
My impression is that some of that was on purpose. I think maybe the point is that Hepburn had begun to act out her own caricature, at least in public. Remember the scene where Hughes asks her whether she knows the difference anymore between acting and being her ‘real’ self?
(Movie Hughes) It wasn’t made clear until later, but that period where he was being made to spell “quarantine” was during the 1918 Flu Epidemic, which killed, according to Wikipedia, 25 million to 40 million people. That epidemic was enough to scare the crap out of any son’s mother, but she took it to some kind of extreme, which had to have affected him.
(Real-life Hughes) He was born in December 1905, which would have made him 17-18 when the Pandemic happened, and I doubt she was giving him baths at that time, so she couldn’t have “caused” his OCD. Wikipedia says this: “Hughes contracted syphilis as a young man, and much of the strange behavior at the end of his life has been attributed by modern biographers to the tertiary stage of that disease.”
I thought it was a good movie. Prediction: It’ll be nominated for more Oscars than any other movie. It’ll win at least half of them including Best Picture, and Scorcese will win Best Director, easy. Blanchett better win Best Supporting Actress or I’ll, well, be unhappy.
Thanks to the DVD coming out recently, I had the pleasure of watching this film. Completely fascinating and enjoyable. I’m glad it lived up to the hype! Cate Blanchett derserved her Oscar. I’m bummed that Leo and Scorcese got snubbed by Oscar (damn you “Million Dollar Baby”) Also, the Influenza pandemic was kicked off due to soldiers returning from WWI, which ended in 1918, so Hughes would have been 13 or older when the pandemic hit. Does anyone know of a good Katherine Hepburn biography? Amazon didn’t have many reviews.
I finally got to see this as well. I was really looking forward to it, because it’s always bugged me that Howard Hughes went down in history as “that crazy old billionaire in Vegas”. He deserves a much better rememberance than that, and this movie helps set the record straight. His contribution to aviation is large.
As for the acting, I thought DiCaprio was brilliant. He may not have looked much like Hughes early on, but he captured Hughes’ most compelling feature - his penetrating stare. Maybe it was the onset of mental illness coupled with genius, but if you look at early photos and movies of Hughes, it often seems like he’s staring right at you from the page. He had an intensely penetrating gaze, and DiCaprio managed to transmit that regularly through the movie. Excellent work.
I’m more mixed about Cate Blanchette - there was never a time when I thought I was looking at Katharine Hepburn, I was always aware that it was an actress essentially doing an impersonation. But she might have had an impossible task because Hepburn is such a well known figure with such pronounced looks and manners that it would be very hard for me to just accept Blanchette as Hepburn. It would be like someone trying to do a movie bio of Rodney Dangerfield. No matter how good they are at it, it would be almost impossible to have the audience totally suspend disbelief.
I liked it a lot. Best performance dicaprio has had for a while, and it was quite interesting. Good performances all around.
My problems:
1.) Scorcese has one big problem in my mind, and that’s length. His movies almost always end up being too long. Aviator is no exception. Towards the end both me and the person I watched it with were checking our watches, and both agreeed they could have shaved off 15 minutes throughout the movie and helped the pacing.
2.)In keeping with #1, I felt the ending was anti-climatic. Hughs is pretty fricken crazy for a while, then goes to the Senate hearing and flies the Hercules and is pretty damn normal. Then he goes crazy again. It’s just bizarre.
The problem being is that in real life Hughs didn’t go batshit insane until after the 1940’s, but I know Martie made the decision to focus before that to use those two events mentioned as a climaxas the climax. In which case, they should have ended with him sucessfully piloting the Hercules.
This movie confused the hell out of me. There was so much going on, and so little explanation (e.g. I only figured out at the Senate hearings why the FBI felt the need to search Hughes’s house). DiCaprio did a good job, but I’m not sure why. I got the point that Hughes was smart, innovative, charming, but nuts fairly quickly, did it really need 3 hours to do it? Plus Cate Blanchett was downright annoying, even grating at times (didn’t look like hepburn, just… unattractive).
Are all Scorsese flicks like this (I saw Gangs of New York and it was almost slow torture, no general plot or resolution)? Should I avoid them?
I found pretty much all of the flying scenes to be utterly dissapointing. Cockpit scenes were outrageous. You DON’T slam the joystick around the place even when you are flying very agressively.
The crash scene was obviously done by someone who has never seen an aircraft crash. A small light aircraft does not take out bits of houses and clear a 500m path as it comes to rest. Trust me, it’s actually a lot more heart wrenching to see an aircraft hit the ground and come to a grinding holt in a cloud of dust followed by a complete absense of movement from the cockpit, rather than to be forced to sit through the extended cinematic masturbation that occured in THAT crash scene.
All of the engine handling and cockpit indications seemed wrong. The computer generated aircraft didn’t move realistically.
I realise that it’s a movie about a person, not a movie about flying, but given that flying was such a big part of that person’s life, I would have thought the director would take more care with the flying stuff.
I guess doctors get sick of seeing bad medical scenes in movies too. It’s unfortunate really because if I didn’t know any better I would be able to enjoy the movie much more. Instead I get thrown out of movie world whenever there’s some flying and I find myself going “come on man you’re taking off and you’re still at half power, get throttles up for god’s sake” and similar (not out loud of course, I don’t want to ruin other people’s experience.)
Scorcese can be hit and miss. When he’s at his best (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas) there’s none better. If you watch only one more of his movies, watch Goodfellas. I promise you won’t be bored.
Well, I’ve got to disagree with you about a few things. First, about the control stick - some airplanes had control sticks that only move a few inches, while others have had control sticks with the kind of movement you see in the movie. In fact, given the technology behind the Hughes H1 racer and XF-11 and the high speeds they could attain, it makes sense that the ccontrol stick would have a very long lever arm to give the pilot more control, and that would translate into some pretty severe control excursions. Some of those old airplanes had stick travel so great that the limit was the pilot’s legs getting in the way.
First, the XF-11 was not a ‘light aircraft’, it was a military spy plane, with a gross weight of 58,000 pounds, a wingspan of 101 ft and a length of 65 ft. It’s a BIG airplane. In comparison, a DC-3 weighs about half that, has a wingspan 6 ft shorter, and is 2 ft longer.
Second, have a look at this article. It describes the crash, exactly as it happened in the movie. Not only that, I seem to recall seeing footage of the crash scene in the movie that looks like one of the original photos on this page. There is wreckage strewn across a pretty long distance. Scorsese has said he went to great lengths to make that crash as accurate as possible.
I’ll have to watch again, but I didn’t notice anything obviously wrong. What do you mean, like manifold pressure gauges not doing what they are supposed to or something? One touch I really liked was that when he flipped on the master, you could hear all the correct sounds - the electric gyros spinning up, even the little ‘click click click’ of the fuel boost pump.
I’m a real stickler for aviation accuracy, and I just didn’t notice anything very wrong. Do you have some more specifics?
Well… The XF-11 had two gigantic R4360 radial engines in it, and had an untested drive system with contra-rotating props. I think I’d rather ease the power in myself. Also, if he was flying a test hop, he’d have minimal fuel on board, and that spyplane was probably half fuel at gross weight. So being empty, he wouldn’t have needed that much power to take off.
I’ve flown old aeroplanes with a lot of stick travel. Big stick travel doesn’t mean abrupt full control movement though unless you’re doing very aggressive snap rolling type manoeuvres. The outside footage showed the aircraft diving in for a low, high speed, pass. The control movements just didn’t match what the aeroplane was supposed to be doing. If he was in an Edge 540 doing a lamcevak then it might have looked a bit more realistic.
Ok I’ll accept that it may have been an accurate representation of the crash. I still didn’t like it, perhaps it was the excessive detail and time spent on the scene, it just took me right out of the movie.
I can’t remember specifics, though I recall thinking that the RPMS sounded like they were changing all the time when those engines would presumably have had constant speed props so you don’t get the sound of the engine revs increasing as you dive. This is from inside the cockpit. As you would know, the engine and prop sounds from inside the cockpit are quite different to what you hear outside and are generally unexpectedly smooth and steady even when the aircraft is conducting aerobatics.
What no one seems to get right with computer generated aircraft is the impression of inertia. When an aircraft changes direction it rolls to an angle of bank and then starts turning. Too often I see aircraft in movies–and this one is an example–that roll and turn simultaneously. They start heading off in a direction that isn’t matched by their angle of bank. I find it jarring to watch.
The longer you spend on the ground, the more time there is for something to go wrong on the ground. Once you decide that you are going to take off rather than do a high speed taxi run, you smoothly advance the throttles to whatever power setting you’ve decided you’ll use for take off and then you sit back and concentrate on flying the thing. I would have found it believable if he’d been continuously increasing the throttles throughout the take off, but he didn’t, he gave it some power, then he gave it some more, then some more, etc. The way it was portrayed on the movie just didn’t look right. It made me think that Hughes was a bad pilot.
That crash was caused by a loss of oil pressure to the prop control on one engine. The RPM’s were changing all the time, and some serious control issues were created by the asymmetric (and variable) thrust. Hughes had only average piloting skills, anyway.
Depends. Some old aircraft had poor control authority at lower speeds, and poor control response at the best of times, and required large control excursions to make any reasonably fast manoevers. Could be the control inputs aren’t exactly right in the movie, but that’s a pretty minor nitpick.
Certainly Scorsese slowed it way down. Which is fine - it was a dramatic moment in Hughes’ life, so the director wanted to spend a little time on it. Good artistic choice, IMO.
Well, the failure mode WAS the constant speed prop, which eventually went into full reverse. During the failure, surging of the prop isn’t surprising.
Also, a constant speed prop only maintains constant speed through the range of its governor. Take it outside those limits and the RPM will change. What would happen on an engine with conter-rotating propellers, one of which was in full reverse? I have no idea. Were the prop systems interconnected in any way? I don’t know. Certainly RPM changes seem perfectly reasonable given what was happening. The pilot could also have been playing around with the props trying to fix the problem or lessen the aymmettric thrust he had to be getting from that bad prop.
Well, that’s a limitation of CGI in general, but I thought I specifically saw some skidding turns in the biplane footage, althought that might have been real aircraft - can’t remember. I’ll have to watch those scenes again.
But again, compared to movies like Die Hard 2, which has a C-130 Hercules with ejection seats and airplanes that can’t talk to anyone but the control tower, it’s pretty nitpicky to point out the lack of uncoordinated turns in CGI aircraft. By movie standards, I found the aviation stuff very accurate overall. The scenes with the Spruce Goose were enacted exactly as the historical record shows, and the cockpit was an exact match. Given that level of detail and accuracy in that scene, I’m willing to give the director some slack on the stuff I’m not sure of.
Maybe a bit of dramatic license, but not necessarily. These are high horsepower airplanes with unproven power systems, being flown way under gross weight. In the case of the Hughes H-1, don’t underestimate the effect of torque, either. When Hughes flew it, it was equipped with a short wing, and had a 700HP radial engine swinging a big prop. It was also quite light. In an aircraft like that, you bring the power on slowly. Back in the day of the first big radial engines, more than one pilot crashed on takeoff due to torque steer after accelerating too hard. So the takeoff procedure could have been, “Bring the power slowly to X, wait until the control surfaces are biting so you have some rudder authority, then slowly advance the throttle to 75%”.
ElvisL1ves said:
How do you know that? Certainly he showed poor judgement from time to time. Both of the crashes shown in the film were the result of poor judgement by the pilot. Running out of fuel on a test flight is pretty unexcusable. But that was due more to his ego, I’d think. As a stick-and-rudder man, my understanding was that he was very good. The airplanes he was flying were not easy planes to fly, and he was good enough to be allowed to test-fly some high performance airplanes.
Here’s what his Congressional medal citation says:
The Collier trophy was for flying around the world, but the Harmon trophy is given once a year to the ‘most outstanding aviator in the world’. Hughes won it in 1936 and 1938.
This is what gets me about people watching movies who get distracted by the authenticity of the guns, the buttons on the uniforms, or the flying.
First of all, they are completely inconsequential to the movie unless it’s a documentary.
Second of all, experts often disagree on the particulars and so one person is not allowing themselves to enjoy the movie because of things they perceive to be wrong that are in fact correct.
Sam: The prizes that impress you so were for a single flight in a Lockheed Lodestar, not a particularly difficult plane to fly. The XF-11 crash, and several others that were his own fault, were due partly to poor planning and cockpit discipline, and partly due to difficulty in coping quickly with anything going wrong. In short, whenever he had a failure, he crashed - and he killed passengers more than once. A good stick-and-rudder man would have kept the H-4 in the water in a taxi test, too.
