The Flight of the Eagle

8/1/2026

The start of this reminded me of one of my Disney favourites - "The Island at the Top of the World" (1974) as renowned Swedish engineer Salomon Andrée (Max Von Sydow) concludes that he can build a balloon to traverse the Arctic ice to drop a buoy onto the North Pole - and beat the Norwegians to the title, too! Of course there's a fair degree of scepticism from the scientific community and he is going to have raise an extra SKR20,000 from somewhere - maybe even the King - if he is to manufacture something large and stable enough to deal with the temperatures and the winds that prevail hundreds of feet in the air. Set against a series of flashbacks to happier and warmer times, we now follow him and his two sturdy companions Strindberg (Göran Stangertz) and Frænkel (Sverre Anker Ousdal) as th