“Brace for impact.”
Sully, which opened worldwide over the weekend, details the extraordinary true tale of American Airlines pilot Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) along with co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), who on a chilly day, successfully crash-landed a passenger aircraft into the Hudson river with 155 souls on board.
After receiving unwanted overnight fame, Sully encounters some backlash when three National Transportation Safety Board officials claim he could’ve safely returned to the nearest airport instead of risking everyone’s lives on board by landing in the river. Battling their shameless corporate greed, Sully details the exact thought process of his landing in court.
The film juxtaposes the investigation with the landing, allowing us to determine whether it was necessary to crash at all.
While this is a fantastic recount of the three minutes of survival mode Sully endured to save a plane full of people, the story feels pretty padded to reach a respectable run time – with numerous (surely unnecessary) flashbacks to Sully’s early days as a pilot and repetitive phone calls between Sully and his wife (Laura Linney).
Hanks carries the film and, for a while, leads you to believe that there’s more happening then there really is. I felt it could have delved more into the activism Sully pursued in the following years regarding the outrageous cost of obtaining a pilot’s degree in America, and the media’s attempt to turn him into somewhat of a villain for doing so. Instead, we get computer simulations of whether or not he could have returned to LaGuardia.
It’s interesting that a feel-good movie about a successful plane crash was released just before September 11, 15 years later. Though the different perspectives of passengers and crew are perfectly constructed by director Clint Eastwood, along with the extended sequences of the water landing and the assistance of New York’s rescue crew shortly after, the film doesn’t hit the audacious storytelling and sustained intensity it was looking for.
That aside, Sully is triumphant in its depiction of how ordinary people can do extraordinary things when undergoing a crisis. Watching the two pilots guide the plane into the Hudson is pretty inspiring, and seeing the panic from the passengers on board is nothing short of a nightmare.
But stretching 208 seconds into 96 minutes of runtime proves quite tough, and for a Clint Eastwood film, I was expecting him to shine a little bit more light onto the story that we already knew nearly everything about.
Rating: 3½/5
