Not bad, but...

Rating: 7/10 (1 January 2006)

I didn't find this film to be anything more than a solid piece of work, definitely not one of the great movies of our time.
Scorsese just can't seem to get it right any more! After the total catastrophe with "Gangs of New York" he now tries again with Di Caprio in The Aviator. One major flaw in this film in my opinion is the casting of Di Caprio for the role of H.Hughes. He just isn't right for the part, which cannot be said for Cate Blanchett and Kate Beckinsale both of whom do a great job impersonating respectively K.Hepburn and A.Gardner.
The second and to me most important flaw is in the script. The characters are not well developed and the storyline is somehow discontinuous. As a result, we never really understand who Howard Hughes really was, what he felt, what the relationship between him and the women in his life really was, and ultimately as a consequence, we cannot feel for him. To be great, a movie has to generate some kind of emotional response in the viewer, and this one doesn't, it leaves us cold. It would have been different if the film had spent much more time in showing Hughes' feelings, his doubts, his financial troubles and how he risked to overcome them. Instead, in the film it seems that he was just an eccentric genius who had some great ideas and who needed only to order his people to "fix it" in order to have them realized. Nobody's life is that simple, and I cannot imagine Hughe's was either.
In other, camera and special effects where rather good and not exaggerated, the sound average. The overall large amount of Oscars and Nominations the film received is in my opinion, undeserved. All in all, The Aviator is a mediocre to good, but not great, filmed biography that will probably soon be forgotten.