Film Summary CCCIX (Five Weeks in a Balloon)




I've always held the view that a good movie requires one of two things. a room smashing scene such as what happened in Citizen Kane, Or a monkey. It can be a big monkey like King Kong or a little monkey.
And oh boy this movie has one heck of a monkey . He can dance, dress, eat, smokes. He can even carrys a gun. (Will I say ''he'' it might be a she for all I know. You'll have to pardon me I never lifted up the monkey skirt to make sure.)

So you watch a movie based on a Jules Verne novel over a month ago and what do you remember about it? Well not very much. This one guy owns a hot air balloon, brings a bunch of people onto the hot air balloon and then scares the living daylights out of them. I don't understand why he does this though, as these people are the ones who would fund any future excavation he would do over the continent to Africa or anywhere else abroad. In fact it almost seems like his entire scheme is going to be grounded and the only reason he has an adventure at all is because the British government need somebody to plant a British flag in the middle of unoccupied Africa to keep a group of slavers from cleaning the area as their own.

He takes the job but unfortunately for him a certain High Admiral of the British government is going to be accompanying him. Mainly so they make sure the job gets done properly also for the legitimacy of the flag being planted. Nobody gives a damn if some random English citizen plants and English flag in the middle of nowhere. But if the fifth most powerful man in the British military does it; Well that's a different story. The whole thing seems to be going well for them they even bring along this newspaper reporter from America as an international witness. It also helps that his boss is the one who's going to be funding a good chunk of this operation.

What are careless newspaper reporter decides to free some random slave girl living in what I can only presume to be Morocco. There's no evidence that it's Morocco, and could be Egypt for all we know. That's one of the main problems with this movie all the Islamic territories in Africa mingle together as one for modulus cultural entity. And you better believe they're not practising actual Islamic Traditions. Oh no, these people are worshipping a strange form of moon God. Who they believe the American novelist is because he came out of a hot air balloon descending from the sky.
In short the film has a few racial problems. And I'm not talking about Problems by modern standards. Some of the stuff would have been highly offensive in the day. But nobody seems to care and the cultural stupidity of everybody is played up for a laugh. They laugh at the silly Muslim as much as they laugh at the silly Britt. They even throw in an offhand joke about Canadian, but then who's ever cared about a Canadian?

Sadly it's not that entertaining of a film. You expect a Jules Verne novel to have some excitement to it to create a wondrous characterised world with little specks of reality intermixed with a kind of magical environment.
The real problem is our crew of Misfits on their balloon are never in any true Danger. They get out of every situation with relative ease it's only the very last Endeavour that has any states to it. As the balloon crashes into the ground and it's a race to who can plant the flag on a particular spot of Central African territory.

There's a couple of nice set pieces when showing some of the African towns and the clothing design is really good but all this stuff just feels like hand me down from other films. It almost feels like one of those off-hand episodes of Star Trek where they run though Paramount old Studio Productions in search of random crap.
All in all it's a middle-of-the-road film. I'm not upset that I watched it, but I can live happily knowing that I'll never have to be with again. Recommended just to look up all the monkey scenes on the Internet. He really is the unspoken hero of the entire movie.
It's also just a lot of fun to watch Richard Haydn playing a military General. He plays up his role with such excitement that you can't help but be amused. Also any scene with him in the monkey is just gold. Flat-out gold. Along with that fully designed and spectacular looking unicorn Gondola that they use in certain shots. That things really cool too.

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