The Aviator (2004)

Howard Hughes was, undoubtedly, the inspiration for the film-version of Tony Stark. I’ve heard a lot of comments suggesting that it was Elon Musk, but after watching Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator” (2004), there’s no doubt in my mind that Robert Downey Jr.’s version of Stark was based on Hughes’ eccentricity, love of technology and constant desire to push the envelope.
That said I’m also curious Hughes was the inspiration for Howard Stark’s (Tony’s father) name.

I know just about nothing of Hughes’ life, so I cannot comment on how close the movie got to telling the truth on any detail, but what I can say is that everything I saw on screen flowed and felt realistic. If Scorsese had simply invented Hughes as a character, I still would have believed that this was a dramatic biopic.

“The Aviator” tells the story of Howard Hughes’ (Leonardo DiCaprio) life as he transitioned from a movie maker to an aircraft innovator.
It opens with a scene of maybe 10-year-old Hughes’ standing naked in a tub, his mother washing him in a dark, candle lit room during a particularly horrendous typhoid epidemic in Houston, Texas in the late 1800s. While this is used to “explain” his germaphobia later in life, it’s an uncomfortable scene to watch and doesn’t really need to be there - Hughes’ compulsive hand-washing and growing obsession with cleanliness throughout the film make his problem quite clear.

The soundtrack was absolutely outstanding, utilizing a myriad of era-appropriate music, including a snippet of my personal favorite, “Brazil.” I do wish they’d played it longer, but that’s merely a minor desire.
The set pieces spared no expense - every vehicle, every room, every outfit looked like it belonged in the first half of the 20th century. Nothing felt out of place or anachronistic. This is a bit of a “duh” moment, because of course it should be, but it was so well done here that I feel it deserves a shout-out
DiCaprio was, of course, an outstanding choice of lead for this film, putting his everything into being Howard Hughes for the entire 2:45 runtime.
The CGI has not aged well, with many rendered bits looking like old video game cut-scenes now, but they’re simply a victim of time and technology and not something to be looked down upon; those CGI aircraft probably looked flawless by ‘modern’ standards when this movie came out 15 years ago.

Both Adam Scott and John C. Reilly played roles in this movie, which was odd, considering they’re both well established in the comedy movie world though neither of them held a comedic role here. Obviously, this isn’t a comedy, so giving them jokes in the script would have felt out of place; it just seems weird that these two were picked.

There’s a bit role for Errol Flynn, played by Jude Law. He’s only ever shown to be talkative and annoying, which makes me wonder if that’s how the real Flynn was.

Cate Blanchett played Katharin Hepburn, of the (apparently) once-famous Hepburn family, of whom I’d only ever heard of Audrey. I have no idea what kind of accent Katharin had in real life, but in the movie, it was “grating.” Blanchett’s accent seemed to waver between New York, Boston, and British, never setting on any one of them and often merging all three together into some horrifying amalgamation that was painful to listen to whenever she spoke.

In order to skip over blocks of time, the narrator utilized was a news broadcaster, expositing relevant details about things, like how Hughes’ first movie, “Hell’s Angels” (1930) cost $4M to make; an outstanding sum at the time, which equates to approximately $61M today. The narrator described it as the most expensive movie ever made, which it was at the time, but seems incredibly low (accounting for inflation) when many modern movies cost $100M even without impressive aerial acrobatics or CGI explosion-fests.

Unfortunately, the broadcaster simply spoke regular American-English, in what we currently call the ‘midwestern standard’ accent - I would have liked it if they’d given the narrator the ‘mid-Atlantic’ accent that you’d immediately recognize if you’ve ever heard an old radio show or FDR’s “Fear Itself” speech. I’m not entirely sure if that would have been era-appropriate for newscasters in the 40s, but it certainly seems like it would have felt right in this case.

As the movie progresses, it shows Hughes’ slow descent into madness. They never label his condition, so my best guess based on what was shown was that his germaphobia was compounded by some form of OCD and Tourette’s, which must have been existentially terrifying to have to deal with at a time when ‘curing a mental disorder’ was treated with society shunning you instead of psychologists and doctors actually trying to help.
Scorsese did an outstanding job of showing Hughes’ descent as a descent, instead of as one rapid collapse. Throughout the run time, you see his nervous tics get worse and his behavior more erratic. You could practically feel Hughes’ suffering.

Possibly the most interesting part of this movie was the battle between Hughes’ “TransWorld Airlines” (TWA) and Juan Trippe’s “Pan American Airlines” (PanAm). At the time they were titans of industry, fighting over the nascent world of civilian air travel and trans-Atlantic passenger routes. 70+ years later, the only remnant of TWA is the terminal at JFK airport in NYC, which just had its grand “reopening” as a 5-star hotel, while PanAm only exists as a series of disconnected brand-named things.
It was fascinating to see the two largest entities in the market fight for dominance, while here in 2019 neither of them truly exists and there’s nothing solid to remind the average person that they ever flew at all, despite the fact that airline travel is more crucial to business and leisure than ever before.
Fun fact: DiCaprio played a PanAm pilot in his previous movie, “Catch Me If You Can” (2002).

During the process of the two airlines fighting for control of the airways, there was a court scene where Howard Hughes had to answer to a corrupt Senator Owen Brewster, who was firmly in the pocket of PanAm. The scene looked and played out very similarly to the courtroom scene in “Iron Man 2” (2010), thus enforcing my belief that much of the MCU’s version of Tony Stark is based on the real-life Howard, or at lease Scorsese’s version of Howard, including the part where the Senator’s plan was unraveled by their own greed and corruption.

Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) was clearly the villain to Hughes and his TWA. In the movie, he was almost cartoonishly evil. He was one white cat away from being a Bond villain. I realize that capitalism is all about companies fighting each other for market dominance, but Trippe seemed just a bit over-the-top.

Some scenes with aircraft, like the XF-11 demo that Hughes built for the U.S. Army Air Force, looked like the production crew actually got their hands on a full-sized model. The movie made it sound like only one version of the plane was every fully realized, so kudos to the crew for finagling such a replica.
The “Spruce Goose,” despite the name, was entirely made out of birch. But since nothing appropriate rhymes with ‘birch’ the press didn’t use it and instead opted for another species of tree to make fun of the H-4 “Hercules” that Hughes Aircraft Company built. The one and only H-4 is on display at the Air & Space Museum in Oregon, and I can only hope that some of the scenes of DiCaprio inside it were filmed inside the actual behemoth. Considering the quality of this movie, it wouldn’t surprise me if Scorsese dragged the film crew to Oregon for that exact reason.
For the only flight that the H-4 took, it must have been awe-inspiring sight for the journalists and photographers watching from the ground - it was a hell of a technological marvel.
Another fun fact: The C-5M Galaxy, the U.S. Air Force’s largest cargo plane, has a wingspan of only 222ft, while the H-4 eclipsed that at 320ft.

This was an outstanding movie, and I think I would have loved to see it in theaters when it came out.
I was 12 in 2004, and 12-year-old me probably would have found it incredibly boring.
Adult-me enjoyed it very much.