A most enjoyable movie and I had NEVER heard of Amelia Earheart before I watched this movie, so there, did i have to? She was one gutsy woman, portrayed by this film, who put flying first and love second, that is why clearly Richard Gere had to take a peripheral role in this role and though I feel Gere was the wrong man for the job this time around, he did the job well enough. the British Christopher Eccleston produced an extraordinary American accent playing Fred Noonan and Ewan McGregors role was comfortable enough.

the flying element of the film has received a lot of criticism, by those who understand aviation and by those (me included) who know nothing of aviation. As an aviation spectacle, the film definitely works because this is a love story of one woman with flying, not one womans love story with George Putnam or the other 'chap'! let us clear be about that and enjoy the film for what it is.

Not award winning at Oscar level but entertaining and interesting. Some of the facts may have been changed around but not the basics, again I say this is a movie for entertainment and not a documentary and thank god I didn't get dished something like Nights at Rodanthe which I was served the last time I watched Gere with a mature woman.

Hilary Swank is beyond criticism in this role, she clearly researched her character and acted with great integrity and pride. Amelia Earheart clearly flew at a time of aviation transformation and full credit to her for what she did in her life, whether she was foolhardy or not, she died doing something she loved.

Sometimes we can know too much and it spoils our instinctive enjoyment of something; don't let that happen with this film. I am not a fan of Swank or Gere but to be honest, they delivered the goods here against the odds.

This isn't a terrible movie but it prompts one to wonder if Hollywood has completely run out of new ideas, the way a car might run out of fuel in the middle of some wasteland in Kansas. Maybe like the driver, with any luck, the day may come when the producers can flag down a passing best seller. I only ask because this is basically a remake of an older TV movie about Amelia Earhart, popular aviator of the early 1930s. The earlier version starred Susan Clark and was made on a smaller budget and with fewer visual effects.

The themes, though, and the events through which they're expressed, are just about identical.

Since she was a child in the American Midwest, Amelia Earhart has wanted to fly. Now, grown into an appealing young woman with sandy hair and freckles -- shades of Charles Lindbergh -- she is still desperate to fly. She write paeans to "the starr'd face of night." (Well, she didn't write that exact phrase but might as well have.)

But in order to fly, one needs an airplane, and airplanes and their paraphernalia cost money. So after she breaks a few aviation records and becomes popular, her promoter, with whom she has an open marriage, Richard Gere, markets her image through endorsements of products like Lucky Strike cigarettes. I think there is still an Amelia Earhart line of luggage, isn't there? This sets up one of the basic conflicts because she's a little ashamed of the commercial side of things.

After all, as she proclaims repeatedly, all she wants to do is fly -- and to challenge the aviation barriers that exist. She's the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air. But she does so as a passenger in a plane flown by two men, so later she does the job alone. This business about being devoted to flying, I'd ordinarily dismiss as nothing more than a conventional fiction common to stories about heroes and heroines, especially those who have died in pursuit of their obsessions, like Earhart. But I've known aviators and some have been possessed by this same passion, though they weren't as pretty or famous as Amelia Earhart.

Morally, Hillary Swank as Earhart is practically flawless. She's devoted, candid, modest. But she's an over-achiever too. Her final attempt to break a record that hasn't even been established yet -- flying around the world -- pushes the envelope too far. Neither she nor her navigator have enough skill or common sense to get the job done. The Lockheed Electra she's flying can't carry enough fuel to complete one of the planned hops -- an extremely long flight to a tiny dot in the Pacific called Howland Island, where a Coast Guard cutter is waiting for her. She and her navigator can't receive transmissions by Morse code because they have fecklessly thrown out their receiver to save weight. They can't determine their position relative to Howland Island and disappear forever into the Pacific.

The scenes of flight are impressive and Hillary Swank looks right for the part although she has a ferocious set of choppers that never leaped out of the real Earhart's smile. Swank herself turns in a decent performance in what is basically a stereotyped role. She's no longer the teen-ager of her earlier movies. I wouldn't want to be a movie actress accustomed to playing leads because my career would be so awesomely short. You have about a ten-year launch window before you wind up in character roles or on game shows.

Anyway, this is a familiar story to anyone connected to American popular history. I'm thankful that feminism wasn't laid on with a trowel.

"Everyone has oceans to fly as long as they have the heart to do it," she remarks. And, "What do dreams know of boundaries?" If you find lines like that inspirational, you'll enjoy this movie a lot. She believed it but as for me, though my dreams know no boundaries, I once flew over an ocean and crashed in it.