The Aviator , 2004

Some people claim The Aviator was the best film of 2004, and I have to say that I strongly disagree. From where I was sitting, The Aviator was too long, too thin, and too boring. It suffered from an interesting problem. It was too short to really flesh out each character and every plot line. At the same time, it was already to long for my tastes. The Aviator started out fast and exciting. It quickly dwindled and never really picked back up. There were long sections of the film where nothing seemed to happen. There were several characters who seemed interesting enough, but I never learned enough about them to really care. For the most part, the events of the movie were boring and barely held my attention. In short, the film's major weakness was it's pacing. The acting was wonderful, as one might expect from such a cast. What I was left wondering is this: was Katherine Hepburn really that annoying!?! Wow. I couldn't have dealt with that... The film did have a few stand out scenes, though. I particularly enjoyed the crash scene. Watching Hughes' plane wipe out nearly an entire apartment building was pretty fantastic. The DVD sounded good, but was nothing extraordinary. The surrounds were used fairly minimally and the dialogue was crisp and clear. The video didn't fair quite as well. The film's color palette introduced a lot of reds to the transfer, and red is a notoriously hard color for the DVD format. That was evident here, as red lipstick and red dresses seemed to bloom and bleed. Red issues aside, the detail levels were high and the colors were well saturated. I can't say I really recommend The Aviator. As much as I like Martin Scorsese, his last two films have been somewhat disappointing to me. The Aviator dragged through most of the film and was too long for it's own good.

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