The Balloonists

When your granddad was the first man to fly a balloon into the stratosphere and your other ancestors were so intrepid, they had Star Trek’s lead character named after them, you’re probably not going to end up as a chartered surveyor. Sure enough, Swiss explorer Bertrand Piccard, the protagonist in this high-altitude adventure, had one goal in 1999: to be the first person to travel 26,000km across all the 360 meridians without touching down, dangling beneath the only thing bigger than his ego. ‘At the time, I realised that it was his duty to be famous,’ dryly notes an ex-teammate.

A great central figure for a documentary, in other words. Part-hero, part-villain, the robustly confident Piccard is owning up to his polarising nature one minute, comparing himself with Neil Armstrong the next. This enthralling but breathless doc slowly falls for him, as he and his unfussy British co-pilot Brian Jones set off in the Breitling Orbiter 3 from Switzerland to Egypt. Also on the flightplan? To beat two other teams, one led by madcap entrepreneur-adventurer Richard Branson.

Documentarian John Dower has long been drawn to superstars, enthusiasts and obsessives. His career has taken in Louis Theroux’s My Scientology Movie, Muhammad Ali doc Thriller in Manila, and another film about people getting high, Britpop oral history Live Forever. He’s great at drawing the story from Piccard, Jones and others in talking head interviews that break up the period footage. Piccard yearns to be worthy of the family name; Jones just wants to be back with his wife. Cooped up in their tiny capsule for 20-odd days, the odd-couple pair are a fascinating study in unexpected camaraderie. 

Part-hero, part-villain, Piccard is a great central figure for a documentary

The Balloonists doesn’t really make the case for those Armstrong parallels. It breezes past any sense of scientific discovery to slipstream along with claustrophobic capsule footage and widescreen shots of the planet from above. It captures what an eccentric undertaking this was: a big red pill floating beneath a 180-foot balloon, two bold but nutty characters nervously fiddling with charts and checking in with their team’s weather savant to guide them to the nearest jetstream. 

The potential perils are legion: from ditching in the Pacific, to being tossed about in a storm or shot down over Yemen. And that’s before you get to all the mountains they could crash into. But for all the moments of fear and anxiety, the Breitling Orbiter 3’s journey was a binary business – it either crashed or it didn’t – and the outcome is never in doubt. There’s few of the kind of mini-crises that keep the pulse so high in survival docs The Rescue, Touching the Void and Last Breath.

But it’s a great adventure story, and Dower’s ebullient doc captures the exhilaration of following it on the news at the time. Perhaps it’s time Piccard embarked on another one of his quixotic expeditions.

In UK and Ireland cinemas May 22.