Sully tells a story we already know

Warner Bros. Pictures

If you were born sometime after 2009, you probably have some awareness of the event that became known as “The Miracle on the Hudson.” Airline captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and his co-pilot Jeff Skiles were just taking off from LaGuardia Airport when their plane was struck by a flock of birds. Not an unusual incident, but this one was unprecedented when both engines were taken out of commission. The pilots remained calm and the flight attendants did their jobs, but with total engine failure there was no time to get to any runway in New York or New Jersey. Sully’s only option was to attempt a landing on the Hudson River. And he did so successfully (luckily it was the early part of January so boat traffic was virtually non-existent), saving all 155 souls on the plane. It was a remarkable story, Sully became a new American hero, and he’s used that experience to advocate for better safety measures for airplanes.

So now that we already know how this story ends, how can one make a movie of the event? Of course Titanic was a monster hit even though we knew the ship was going to sink, but the added drama of a fictional romance is what drew audiences to that film time and time again. With Sully, it’s more difficult to fictionalize an event that took place less than ten years ago when the public is already so familiar with the lead character. So while the near disaster is the impetus for the film, director Clint Eastwood makes the focus the NTSB investigation into Sully’s and Skiles’ actions.

While the scenes of the incident on the plane are intense, Eastwood amps up the drama in the investigative process by painting the members of the NTSB as the bad guys, contentiously looking to pin something on the pilots, perhaps to show human error is what resulted in the crash (which Sully always corrects to a “water landing” since the plane remained intact and no one died) for insurance purposes. While the film is based on Sullenberger’s book, the contentious hearings were not as dramatic as depicted in the film. Many NTSB officials are saying they were impressed by how well the men did, and the investigations were solely to find solutions on how to prevent such things from happening in the future, never to pin something on the men. Even Sully insisted the real names of the NTSB board members be changed for the movie because such dramatic license was taken. The unfortunate effect is that the film will become “truth” for those who see it, painting the government in an even worse light than most already believe.

While the movie is competently made, and Hanks gives a terrifically stoic performance as Sully with able support from Aaron Eckhart as Skiles, it feels incredibly dragged out for 95 minutes. Eastwood has to indulge in a few flashbacks to Sully’s early piloting days, there is a totally nonsensical moment in an airport gift shop that seemed like a moment from the original Airport meant to connect us to a couple of the passengers, and then there are the back and forth phone calls between Sully and his wife Lorraine, which seem to only be in the film to illustrate Sully’s terrible financial state. They really were unnecessary moments of padding, but without them the film would have only been an hour long. And the less said about Eastwood’s grating musical score the better. It’s not easy to make a piano sound like nails on a chalkboard, but Eastwood manages to do just that.

This begs the question though — did this story need to be made as an IMAX theatrical film? Probably not (and seeing an IMAX shot film not formatted properly for a non-IMAX screen resulted in the tops of heads constantly being cut off which was very distracting). It really would have been a perfectly fine HBO movie. That’s not to say it’s a bad movie by any means, it just lacks any real emotional punch save for the very well staged plane scenes (and too many flashbacks with Sully seeing planes crashing into buildings in New York City are unnerving and unnecessary), and the manufactured “courtroom drama” does everyone involved a huge disservice. But Hanks really carries the movie and could end up with an Oscar nomination, so that may be the biggest reason to see Sully.