Falls short on realism

Rating: Null/10 (21 June 2016)

The acting and music were impeccable. DiCaprio made a convincing Hughes despite his differing stature/figure to the tall lanky gentleman. DiCaprio's stellar acting ability was repeated as well by the other players, including Alan Alda and Brent Spiner.
Historical facts may or may not bear out the movie. It was said in many books Hughes hated Black People because of a Houston riot when he was a boy. Whether he hated Houston, as alleged in the script, was very questionable also, referring to Houston as a "disease infested swamp" (or words to effect). Besides, if he hated Houston as much as inferred in this film, why would he have returned to Houston in 1976 having a renal failure which killed him? Why not return to LA? After all he was in Mexico during the emergency. True, the climate of Southern California is a popular preference to most places in the world, but it is unnecessary to do a put down on the desirability of anyplace by Hollywood, because of seemingly contemporary politics or whatever, of this day. I have doubts this same script would have appeared during the administration of Ann Richards as the Texas Governor in the 1990s.
I have a complaint about over-dependence on CGI, something other reviewers on many films of late are making "cartoon" references to, telling complaints about directors who sacrifice the real thing for CGI. The whole drift toward dependency on CGI is fine for Star Wars, but is is utterly silly to substitute CGI for real props (pardon the pun) when the real things are available. It ruined what could have been a stellar "Aviator", IMHO. Case in point: Director Scorsese's film enlisted the appearance of a genuine living, airworthy, Lockheed 1049G Constellation wearing, of all things, TWA livery. This airplane was flown all the way from Kansas City to Burbank, restored to perfect flying order, only to be replicated a half dozen times on a tarmac as the big plane for the budding TWA. Isn't CGI great? No flying scenes were taken with that rare living airplane at all...NONE. I was pretty shocked This was a TERRIBLE loss indeed.