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.

I found this to be exactly as a few had described: "a fair movie, not great but not bad, either." I'm not surprised it didn't do well at the box office even though I cannot pan the film. I enjoyed it.

Even though I liked it, something was missing: maybe an edge and a few things to get us more involved with the characters. It was hard to warm up to either Earhart (Hilary Swank) or her husband George Putnam (Richard Gere.). Swank and Gere usually play interesting roles so to see them so bland here is a bit of a surprise.

Kudos to Stuart Dryburgh, director of photography, for a very pretty picture. He's done some nice work in the past, such as "The Painted Veil." The airplanes and the overall look of the 1930s is wonderful in here, often capturing my attention more than the dialog.

Overall, it's a pleasant film, a romance more than an adventure. Don't let naysayers discourage you from seeing it, yet on the other hand, don't spend big bucks on it, either.

Women are not much into histories and documentaries and guys aren't much into romances. It took me a good 30-40 minutes before I could get into the film. Hilary Swank portrays Amelia as a woman who wanted to prove herself in a man's world, perhaps more to herself than to make a statement. She always wanted to test her boundaries, both as a pilot and in her personal life. After her early successes she was a "booth girl" marketing products and being asked questions about what she wore.

The film covers the highlights of her life and includes her affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor) who perhaps makes a better leading man than Richard Gere. We do see some early foreboding as when Amelia crosses the Atlantic looking for Paris, lands in Ireland...now on her final trip around the world she has a navigator with a drinking problem and she needs to find a small island in the Pacific to refuel (something smaller than the European continent that she missed). Guess how that works out?

The problem with this film is that they made it complex. It is a woman's story of achieving in a man's world. It is a love story. It is a romance. It is a history. But it wasn't an action film or a thriller.