We see the world as she must have from the cockpit that day, with the land a patchwork of greens and browns spreading out below, the sky endlessly blue, those sweeping vistas giving us a sense of the freedom that fueled Earhart's passion for flying.There is also the hint of trouble in the air, but for the moment, Nair leaves that hanging and takes us back to fill in a few of the blanks of Earhart's life. The film, which is interspersed throughout with scenes from her last flights, begins Amelia's story in 1928, when she was chosen as a crew member (really just a passenger) on a transatlantic flight.
– Hilary Swank is superlative as Amelia Earhart, say critics, but the too-conventional movie around her never really engages in what made the aviatrix tick and stays earthbound as a result. Swank is "strangely mesmerizing as Earhart," writes Connie Ogle in the Miami Herald, but director Mira Nair's biopic "never—unlike the famous aviatrix—takes chances." It's "big-hearted yet by-the-numbers." The audience never sees the "steely force that drives grand ambition, the fears, the flaws," complains Betsy Sharkey at the Los Angeles Times. "Mostly we see Amelia in flight, touching down around the world like a History Channel travelogue, or seeing small slices of her life unfold like a fashion spread, gorgeous but vacuous." At frustratingly infrequent intervals, Mick LaSalle writes in the San Francisco Chronicle, "we get a hint of the movie they wanted to make and hoped they were making: One about the thrill of early aviation and the promise of a young century."