THE STORY – Follows the improbable team of Piccard and Jones, who competed against the world’s finest pilots and extremely wealthy adventurers in 1999 to become the first individuals to fly a hot air balloon around the globe nonstop.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – John Dower (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 86 Minutes
Wouldn’t you like to fly in a beautiful balloon? How about while crammed into a capsule with another person for weeks at a time, riding the vagaries of the wind while scraping ice off the window while the cold outside plunges below arctic temperatures? Would it be worth spending millions of dollars and massive amounts of manpower to accomplish something that seems like the feat of another age? Jown Dower’s delightful documentary “The Balloonists” tracks just such an adventure, focussing on the accomplishments of Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones, as well as the others that attempted to be the first to circumnavigate the globe in a hot air balloon. Their vessel is a far cry from the usual silk, rope, and basket routine, making this far less a feat of aeronautics and more akin to missions to space.
This is fitting, given that part of Piccard’s drive is due to his being the heir to a legacy of global firsts. The august accomplishments of his grandfather Auguste included flying his own balloon to the edges of space, putting in the record books as the first to traverse the stratosphere in a helium-inflated device and to safely return. Auguste’s son, Jacques, was a pioneering undersea explorer (akin to another famous French Jacques), and way back in 1960 was the first to take a manned submarine down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, reaching a near insane depth of around 36,000 feet below the surface.
Driven in part by the soaring and sinking deeds of father and grandfather, the heir to the Piccard name spent years assembling a team to tackle one of the last remaining records in aeronautics, one that had eluded similar attempts for generations. “The Balloonists” documents the race to be the first, including the likes of billionaires such as Richard Branson who took it upon themselves to find unique ways of plowing through their equally stratospheric wealth.
Dower’s film contains tremendous archival footage from the various attempts from the 1990s, including rare onboard footage, media responses, and the like. Yet what sets the film apart from being a mere celebration of the feat is the decades that have passed which provides an opportunity for greater distance and reflection. A series of contemporary talking head-style interviews are engaging and at times emotional, while Dower and his collaborators weave these latter-day reflections with the more boisterous contemporaneous commentary.
Visually, the film is a stunner, with the many days floating over the vast expanse of the Saraha and various oceans providing sublime vistas captured by the onboard cameras. The release of the gas containers, dropping like empty bombs onto the arid sands below, provides an odd feeling of catharsis, a shedding of weight helping to feel that the mission may in fact be successful.
Even knowing the outcome, the film still plays a bit like a thriller, the sporting and competitive aspects of the adventure adding to its compelling nature. Yet at its core, this is a deeply human story, one where disparate individuals with very different personalities come together on this common quest, one where there’s a gentlemanly nature to the competition, an old-timey “good show, old man” to the victor. It’s fitting, then, for something that feels out of time like a balloon race to have a sense of Victorian bravado and cheer, yet the pleasantries never quite overwhelm the very real sense that these were indeed life-or-death missions.
Most interestingly, if the least cinematic, is the realization that the key to the mission often has less to do with the decisions being made in the capsule, but with the fact that modern forecasting and the instincts of a meteorologist are at least as integral to the ship’s state as anything up in the air. It’s a wild feeling to realize that it’s only the vertical controls (more gas to rise, less to lower) that generate the forward momentum, and where decisions being made to go slower in order to go farther feel as counterintuitive to audience members as they did in the capsule.
“The Balloonists” is a wild ride, and a captivating journey through this world of adventure. It’s also a deeply human story, one where hubris and courage mix like the gasses aboard the vessel, sometimes making things rise to implausible heights, sometimes crashing to the ground. This is a beautiful tale about beautiful balloons and the joyful feeling of floating along with this fascinating story is a rare thing indeed.
