Personally I thought the film was heartbreaking and it had the most beautiful cinematography I've seen in a long time. I see a lot of people posted that in the version they saw, Ivan had an affair with the journalist but in the version I saw this evening, there is only one sex scene and its between Ivan and his wife.
share... duly noted (the sex scenes bit) in my post in the Ch-ch-ch-changes thread below. As for the cinematography... my problem with Aloft is that I'm from an area that is that cinematography. When we're not sweltering through another SWAMPTASTIC! north-central summer, we're freezing our tits off five to seven months out of the year and wondering if the world is, in fact and for realsise, gray and white and not in color. So I spent the outdoors sequences of Aloft thinking (a) yep, that's a pretty blue winter sky, alright; (b) the snow cover just increased-- or decreased-- some eighty percent between this shot and the last one; (c) ooh, that's cold, you betcha; and (d) what in the hell are you idiots doing out there? Look at the sky. There's a front coming in.
And I'll maintain 'til the cows come home that while the outdoor photography has the professional sheen of National Geographic stock footage, the indoor photography looks like it was lit with flashlights and shot through a dirty mason jar.
Didn't feel any real heartbreak. More like a facebreak, actually: Cillian Murphy has never been so punchable in a role, ever. (And this is counting both Jackson "The Smirkmaster" Rippner and smug lizard-king Tommy Shelby.) Adult Ivan is a dick. Period. There's grief (and those of us who lost a sibling at a young age know that grief all too well), and there's growing the hell up and acting like a decent human being nonetheless... and adult Ivan? He's got some growing up to do.
Queen Jupiter, you must've seen the shorter version of the movie, same one I saw a few weeks ago (see my separate thread on that).
When I checked into it after seeing the obviously shortened version, I was astonished to read that Ivan and the journalist were said to be having an affair, as there was no hint of it whatsoever in the shortened edit which I saw.
The Ivan/journalist affair is just one of several significant differences that appear to exist between the shortened version I saw and the original version (at least 15 minutes longer). My source of information was the plot summary as posted on Wikipedia (where I learned of the Ivan-journalist affair for the first time):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloft_(film)
As Taconites points out in another post, those plot summaries on Wikipedia are not a guarantee that they are correct, and that is certainly true. That said, I have found that more often than not, the plot summaries on Wikipedia are in fact pretty much on point.
Just a tip.
Add [url to the beginning of your address and /url] to the end for a clickable link.
I learned that here. : )