'The Aviator' (1985): The Christopher Reeve Adventure Movie That Crashed Into Obscurity

There Were Two George Millers. Rosanna Arquette Picked the Wrong One.

There are bad decisions.

There are unfortunate decisions.

And then there are the decisions that involve flying halfway around the world, arriving in the mountains of Yugoslavia and discovering that the director you thought was responsible for Mad Max is actually the guy who made The Man from Snowy River.

Rosanna Arquette made that decision.

Technically, it wasn’t even her fault.

Well, not entirely.

In 1985, Arquette sat down with Roger Ebert for the Chicago Sun-Times to talk about her increasingly busy career. She had The Executioner’s Song behind her, Desperately Seeking Susan, After Hours and Silverado around the corner, and The Aviator in the rearview mirror.

And Ebert asked her about it.

Her response was brutally honest.

She called the movie “very boring.”

Then she explained why she had signed on.

She thought she was going to be directed by George Miller.

You know.

George Miller.

The Australian George Miller.

The Mad Max George Miller.

The doctor-turned-filmmaker who had unleashed a leather-clad Mel Gibson onto the highways of a collapsing Australia.

Instead, she got George T. Miller.

The Australian George Miller who had directed The Man from Snowy River.

“Very slight misunderstanding,” Arquette told Ebert.

Then she slapped the side of her head and called herself “Dumb.”

Honestly, I think she was being a little hard on herself.

Because The Aviator isn’t very boring.

It is, however, very 1985.

And that is why I think it deserves another look.

Christopher Reeve Wanted to Be More Than Superman

By the time The Aviator arrived in theaters in March 1985, Christopher Reeve had already become Superman.

That was both a blessing and a problem.

Reeve had played the Man of Steel in Superman and Superman II, but he was clearly interested in doing something other than flying around in a cape.

So what better way to demonstrate his range than by playing a guy who flies around in an airplane?

Okay.

Maybe that wasn’t the best career strategy.

But this time Reeve was playing Edgar Anscombe, a Contract Air Mail pilot in the late 1920s. Edgar has survived a terrible training accident that killed another pilot, and the experience has left him emotionally scarred.

He keeps flying anyway.

Then he gets stuck with a passenger.

Tillie Hansen.

Played by Rosanna Arquette.

Tillie is young, wealthy, spoiled and spectacularly unimpressed by Edgar’s general attitude toward humanity.

Edgar is not exactly thrilled with her either.

Then their airplane crashes in the mountains.

And now they have wolves.

And snow.

And injuries.

And starvation.

And each other.

Because apparently the wilderness wasn’t cruel enough already.

The movie was based on Ernest K. Gann’s 1981 novel The Aviator, written by the same Ernest K. Gann whose The High and the Mighty had already been turned into a major 1954 John Wayne aviation movie. Marc Norman adapted Gann’s novel for the screen.  

The basic story is an old-fashioned survival adventure wrapped around a romance.

Which is probably why the movie feels like it wandered into 1985 from another decade.

George T. Miller Had Already Made a Hit

The director confusion becomes even funnier when you look at George T. Miller’s career.

Miller had directed The Man from Snowy River in 1982, the Australian adventure film starring Kirk Douglas and Jack Thompson.

It wasn’t some obscure little movie nobody had seen.

The Man from Snowy River was a genuine international success, earning more than $20 million in North America and roughly $50 million worldwide.

So when Arquette heard “George Miller,” there was at least a perfectly reasonable reason to expect an Australian adventure filmmaker.

There was just another George Miller.

And that other George Miller had made Mad Max.

The distinction is important.

The Mad Max George Miller was born in Queensland, studied medicine and worked as a doctor before moving into filmmaking.  

George T. Miller was the filmmaker behind The Man from Snowy River.

Arquette remembered both men as Australian directors and recalled the medical connection in her conversation with Ebert, but the “doctor” part properly belongs to the Mad Max Miller. The confusion itself, however, was very real.

And apparently Arquette didn’t discover it until she arrived in Yugoslavia.

That might be my favorite movie-production story of 1985.

Welcome to Yugoslavia

If you’re going to make an aviation survival movie set in the American Northwest, obviously you should go to Yugoslavia.

That’s exactly what happened.

Although the story is set in the American West/Northwest, production used locations in what was then Yugoslavia, including areas around Rijeka in present-day Croatia and Ljubljana/Kranjska Gora in present-day Slovenia.  

And honestly?

It looks pretty damn good.

The mountains give the movie a sense of scale that a soundstage never could.

There is snow.

There are cliffs.

There are forests.

There are enormous stretches of wilderness where two people can disappear very quickly.

And then there are the airplanes.

The production used Boeing-Stearman biplanes, with aviation documentation identifying three Stearmans used during filming.  

That matters because The Aviator is at its best when it stops trying to be a romantic drama and remembers that it is an airplane movie.

And Christopher Reeve was actually a pilot.

A serious one.

Contemporary biographical material described him as a professionally qualified pilot with more than 2,000 hours in the air. He also knew how to fly a Stearman, which was one of the reasons the flying sequences could be made more authentically.  

So when Reeve climbs into that cockpit, there is something wonderfully appropriate about it.

Superman is flying again.

Only this time there’s no cape.

The Movie’s Best Special Effect Is the Landscape

The credits are a pretty impressive collection of 1980s adventure-movie talent.

Mace Neufeld and Thomas H. Brodek produced it.

David Connell handled the cinematography.

Dominic Frontiere provided the score.

Jack Warden, Sam Wanamaker, Scott Wilson, Tyne Daly and Marcia Strassman fill out the supporting cast.  

And you can see where the movie wants to go.

This is supposed to be a big, old-fashioned adventure.

A man with emotional baggage.

A spoiled rich girl.

A dangerous wilderness.

An airplane crash.

Wolves.

Romance.

Personal redemption.

It’s practically a checklist.

Unfortunately, the screenplay sometimes feels like it knows that it is working from a checklist.

That was the major complaint from a lot of critics in 1985.

Characters were thin.

The dialogue could be clunky.

The pace could drag.

And some reviewers felt the movie simply recycled familiar adventure and romance conventions without finding much new to say about them.

Even the movie’s defenders tended to admit that the story was familiar.

But here’s the thing.

I’m not convinced familiarity is automatically a crime.

Sometimes you just want to watch Christopher Reeve fly a 1920s biplane into a beautiful mountain range.

I have seen worse ways to spend 96 minutes.

Critics Were Not Feeling Particularly Charitable

The contemporary reviews were rough.

Very rough.

Pat Kilpatrick essentially argued that The Aviator relied on its actors to keep things interesting and compared it unfavorably with the aerial adventure High Road to China, while still giving credit to the Yugoslavian scenery and Frontiere’s score.

Jay Boyar was considerably less forgiving, describing the movie as a collection of adventure clichés and joking that the characters were so thin they could be folded into paper airplanes.

Robert W. Butler gave it 1½ stars and called it a “desultory romantic adventure,” criticizing Marc Norman’s dialogue and shallow characterization.

Allen Hasson of The Idaho Statesman went even further, giving it one star and arguing that the movie never generated enough danger to make the survival story convincing.

And then there was Joe Leydon, who actually liked it.

Leydon gave the movie three out of four stars and saw something different in George T. Miller’s approach. He argued that Miller treated the clichés and conventions of older movies with affection rather than simply copying them, and he particularly praised Reeve and Arquette.  

I find that more interesting than the pile-on.

Because that is exactly what The Aviator feels like now.

Not a great movie.

Not a lost masterpiece.

But an affectionate old-fashioned adventure movie that happens to have been made in the middle of a decade increasingly obsessed with something else.

And then came Siskel and Ebert.

They weren’t interested in being charitable.

They named The Aviator a “stinker” of the week.

Ebert essentially argued that the film combined clichés from two different genres into something remarkably silly, while Siskel’s assessment was even more brutal: he found no good scene in the entire movie.  

Ouch.

That’s the kind of review that doesn’t leave much oxygen in the room.

And Then There’s Rosanna Arquette

The funniest thing about The Aviator might be that Rosanna Arquette seems to have understood exactly what kind of movie she was making.

In her conversation with Roger Ebert, she openly admitted that she thought it was boring.

But she also talked about the experience of making it.

She had gone to the mountains of Yugoslavia believing she was going to work with the man who had made Mad Max.

Then she discovered she was working with the man who had made The Man from Snowy River.

And honestly, that’s not a bad mistake.

The Man from Snowy River was exactly the kind of film that explains why George T. Miller was hired for The Aviator in the first place.

He understood landscapes.

He understood adventure.

He understood horses and mountains and men trying to prove something to themselves.

The airplane was simply the new horse.

And if the movie occasionally feels like The Man from Snowy River with wings, well…

That’s because it kind of is.

The Reeve-Arquette Combination Is Better Than the Movie Deserved

There is something else here that I think gets lost when you read the old reviews.

Christopher Reeve and Rosanna Arquette are interesting together.

They’re opposites.

Reeve plays Edgar as reserved, wounded and increasingly tired of people.

Arquette plays Tillie as loud, spoiled, impatient and completely unwilling to accept the fact that Edgar doesn’t want to listen to her.

Naturally, they hate each other.

Naturally, they’re going to fall in love.

Naturally, the wilderness is going to force them to become human beings instead of movie stereotypes.

Yes, we’ve seen this movie before.

We’ve seen it approximately 400 times.

But Reeve has an appealing vulnerability beneath his square-jawed leading-man exterior, while Arquette has the kind of nervous, unpredictable energy that keeps Tillie from becoming merely “annoying rich girl.”

And that matters.

Because once the airplane is down and the two characters are stuck together, the movie finally has something to work with.

They have to depend on one another.

The romance isn’t particularly surprising.

But the chemistry is there.

A Small Movie in a Very Big Movie Year

There is another reason The Aviator disappeared.

1985 was not exactly starving for adventure movies.

This was the year of Back to the Future, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rocky IV, The Goonies, Cocoon, Witness and The Jewel of the Nile.

Movies were getting bigger.

Louder.

Faster.

The summer movie was becoming an institution.

And The Aviator arrived with a completely different kind of proposition:

“How about Christopher Reeve in a 1920s airplane?”

Apparently America said:

“How about no?”

The movie earned just $1,304,192 domestically.  

That is not exactly a crash landing.

It’s more like never leaving the runway.

And the reviews didn’t help.

By the time the movie reached home video, it had become one of those Christopher Reeve titles that existed mostly in the cracks between the bigger films.

Which is a shame.

Because there’s a perfectly good little adventure movie hiding in here.

The Aviator Is a Time Capsule

I wouldn’t tell you The Aviator is some misunderstood masterpiece.

It isn’t.

The critics had legitimate complaints.

The screenplay can be awfully broad.

The pacing occasionally feels like somebody left the airplane idling on the runway.

Some of the dialogue sounds like it was written by people who had spent a lot of time watching old adventure movies and not quite enough time talking to actual human beings.

And yet…

I kind of like it.

There.

I said it.

The movie has charm.

The airplanes are wonderful.

The scenery is beautiful.

Reeve looks perfectly at home in the cockpit.

Arquette brings enough personality to keep Tillie from becoming unbearable.

And the survival sections have a physical quality that a lot of modern studio movies don’t bother with anymore.

People are cold.

People are hungry.

People are injured.

The mountains are enormous.

And the wolves aren’t CGI.

This is filmmaking where somebody actually had to go somewhere and point a camera at something.

You can feel that.

The Blu-ray Is a Nice Way Back Into the Wilderness

For anyone who wants to investigate this strange little corner of Christopher Reeve’s career, The Aviator has at least survived in physical media.

Kino Lorber released the film on Blu-ray, presenting the 1985 picture in high definition with its original 96-minute running time and a theatrical trailer.  

And that feels appropriate.

This is exactly the sort of movie that makes sense as a physical-media discovery.

You don’t stumble across it because everybody is talking about it.

You stumble across it because you see Christopher Reeve on the cover wearing a flight helmet.

Then you notice Rosanna Arquette.

Then you see the mountains.

Then you remember that there were apparently two George Millers making Australian adventure movies.

And suddenly you’ve got a Saturday afternoon.

A Pleasant Near-Miss

There are forgotten movies that deserve to be rediscovered because they were secretly masterpieces.

The Aviator isn’t one of those.

There are forgotten movies that deserve rediscovery because they were wildly misunderstood.

I’m not sure The Aviator is one of those either.

But there are also movies that become more interesting with time because they preserve a particular moment in Hollywood.

The Aviator is one of those.

It’s Christopher Reeve trying to step outside Superman.

It’s Rosanna Arquette becoming one of the most interesting young actresses of the decade.

It’s an Australian director bringing the spirit of The Man from Snowy River to an American aviation story.

It’s Yugoslavia standing in for the American Northwest.

It’s real vintage airplanes.

It’s Dominic Frontiere music.

It’s wolves.

It’s romance.

It’s melodrama.

It’s the kind of movie Hollywood used to make all the time.

And, most importantly, it’s a movie with one of the greatest production misunderstandings I’ve ever encountered.

Imagine being Rosanna Arquette.

You sign up for a movie directed by George Miller.

You fly to Yugoslavia.

You meet George Miller.

You tell him how much you love Mad Max.

And he has to explain:

“I’m not that George Miller.”

Somewhere, the other George Miller was probably having a pretty good laugh.

And somewhere, 40 years later, somebody is still trying to explain this movie.

That’s us.

That’s what Movies of the 80s is for.

Have you seen The Aviator? Does the Reeve/Arquette pairing work for you? And what other forgotten 1980s aviation or survival movies deserve another look?

Because I have a feeling there are a few more sitting out there in the wilderness.

Hopefully without wolves.

The Aviator isn’t a classic. But it’s an appealing, beautifully photographed little adventure movie with real airplanes, real locations, two charismatic leads and enough 1980s weirdness to make the trip worthwhile.

And that George Miller story alone is worth the price of admission.

Sources

• Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, “Ebert Talks With ‘Silverado’ Star” (1985). Contemporary interview with Rosanna Arquette, including her story about mistakenly believing she was working with the Mad Max director. Source: user-supplied newspaper clipping.

• ⁠Kino Lorber — The Aviator — Current distributor/physical-media information and production credits.  

• ⁠Box Office Mojo — The Aviator — Domestic box-office and release information.  

• ⁠Smithsonian Libraries — The Aviator catalog record — Home-video credits and production information.  

• ⁠Internet Movie Plane Database — The Aviator — Aircraft and filming-location information.  

• ⁠Australian National Portrait Gallery — George Miller — Background on the Mad Max director’s medical career.  

• ⁠The Man from Snowy River — Box Office Mojo — Box-office history for George T. Miller’s earlier adventure film.  

• ⁠The Aviator — Rotten Tomatoes — Contemporary/reported critical-reception overview and production details.