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Sully
Just in case - The entire story is in the trailer and was a huge story in the news, but in the event that you just arrived on planet Earth - Spoiler Alert for plot revelation.
You can generally recognize Clint Eastwood’s directorial style. You might have seen it in films like Million Dollar Baby, American Sniper or Gran Torino. Like his face and his acting, it’s wrinkly with a determined icy stare that never grins or looks away. Eastwood’s stye continues here in Sully, the story of Chelsey Sullenberger. If you were paying any attention to the news in January of 2009, you would certainly recall the photos of an airliner floating in the Hudson River in New York, surrounded by harbor vessels intended for tourists, passengers standing on the wings, being taken aboard the ships. The plane had just taken off from LaGuardia Airport when it collided with a flock of birds. Enough birds were sucked into the jet engines to stall and damage them. All of a sudden, this aircraft was only 3000 feet up, above a huge city, with no power to climb or maneuver and a full load of fuel, a huge flying bomb with full load of passengers. With no engine power a jet airliner stays aloft only a little better than a tomato can, so the question was not whether it would go down, but just where and in how many seconds. In the urgency of the moment, Sully (Sullenberger) determined that he would not make it back to LaGuardia, nor could he stay aloft long enough to reach a smaller airport in New Jersey. His only recourse was to attempt a controlled landing on the frigid Hudson River. Amazingly, all of the passengers and crew survived to be rescued by the quick acting tour ship captains. The entire incident, from take off to completed rescue took only about a half hour.
This much was in the news for weeks. The rest of the story, however, was the aftermath. The movie mainly tells that story, the media circus that surrounded Sully, the subsequent investigation and the impact on Sullenberger and his crew. Tom Hanks stars as Sully, Aaron Ekhart is Jeff Skyles, the First Officer and Laura Linney is Sullenberger’s wife Lorraine.
The action in this film is partially in the form of flash backs of Sully’s memories of his long career as a pilot and the psychological trauma that can happen in a couple of life threatening moments. It is also about his attempts to survive the predictable inquisition that occurs when the Federal Transportation Safety Board attempts to diagnose the cause of a major incident like an airline crash. In spite of the media attention that made Sully into a hero in the public perception, there were questions about whether his decision to land on the river was the right one. Some after-the-fact computer simulations indicated that he could have glided to one of the two nearby airports and avoided the danger and cost of the water landing. The investigation and aftermath are the substance of the movie.
Like a lot of Eastwood’s movies, Sully is fairly relentless. Its depiction of the stress of the incident and the subsequent investigation don’t let up. Even though we know from the beginning how the story ends, it’s tense, right up to the end of the movie. Between reliving the 200 seconds of the flight and then living through the investigation, Sully is not a light movie or a superficial celebration of a hero. There’s no real villain in this story. The birds are just birds and the FTSB is doing its mandated job of trying to determine what happened and how to prevent such incidents in the future. Sully just wants to survive the investigation, go home and take a break.
Tom Hanks, as Sully, does his usual excellent job of portraying a character. I read that he spent some time with the real Sully in order to learn his mannerisms. His character is the center of the story. The rest of the cast, especially Aaron Ekhart and Laura Linney do their usual jobs of being capable actors, but they are not the center of the story. It’s mostly Hanks’s movie and it’s a memorable performance. Cinematography is quite good. The special effects used to create the crash are extremely believable…you are right there when it all happens, in the cockpit and the passenger cabin. Like my last review, Snowden, this is another ripped-from-the-headlines factual story; there are no surprises in the end. Nevertheless, Eastwood’s unblinking look at the story makes it engaging, suspenseful and enjoyable. You end with the feeling that everybody in the movie did their damnedest to tell the story and that the story is worth telling. After my adrenaline came back to normal, I really liked the film.
Just in case - The entire story is in the trailer and was a huge story in the news, but in the event that you just arrived on planet Earth - Spoiler Alert for plot revelation.
You can generally recognize Clint Eastwood’s directorial style. You might have seen it in films like Million Dollar Baby, American Sniper or Gran Torino. Like his face and his acting, it’s wrinkly with a determined icy stare that never grins or looks away. Eastwood’s stye continues here in Sully, the story of Chelsey Sullenberger. If you were paying any attention to the news in January of 2009, you would certainly recall the photos of an airliner floating in the Hudson River in New York, surrounded by harbor vessels intended for tourists, passengers standing on the wings, being taken aboard the ships. The plane had just taken off from LaGuardia Airport when it collided with a flock of birds. Enough birds were sucked into the jet engines to stall and damage them. All of a sudden, this aircraft was only 3000 feet up, above a huge city, with no power to climb or maneuver and a full load of fuel, a huge flying bomb with full load of passengers. With no engine power a jet airliner stays aloft only a little better than a tomato can, so the question was not whether it would go down, but just where and in how many seconds. In the urgency of the moment, Sully (Sullenberger) determined that he would not make it back to LaGuardia, nor could he stay aloft long enough to reach a smaller airport in New Jersey. His only recourse was to attempt a controlled landing on the frigid Hudson River. Amazingly, all of the passengers and crew survived to be rescued by the quick acting tour ship captains. The entire incident, from take off to completed rescue took only about a half hour.
This much was in the news for weeks. The rest of the story, however, was the aftermath. The movie mainly tells that story, the media circus that surrounded Sully, the subsequent investigation and the impact on Sullenberger and his crew. Tom Hanks stars as Sully, Aaron Ekhart is Jeff Skyles, the First Officer and Laura Linney is Sullenberger’s wife Lorraine.
The action in this film is partially in the form of flash backs of Sully’s memories of his long career as a pilot and the psychological trauma that can happen in a couple of life threatening moments. It is also about his attempts to survive the predictable inquisition that occurs when the Federal Transportation Safety Board attempts to diagnose the cause of a major incident like an airline crash. In spite of the media attention that made Sully into a hero in the public perception, there were questions about whether his decision to land on the river was the right one. Some after-the-fact computer simulations indicated that he could have glided to one of the two nearby airports and avoided the danger and cost of the water landing. The investigation and aftermath are the substance of the movie.
Like a lot of Eastwood’s movies, Sully is fairly relentless. Its depiction of the stress of the incident and the subsequent investigation don’t let up. Even though we know from the beginning how the story ends, it’s tense, right up to the end of the movie. Between reliving the 200 seconds of the flight and then living through the investigation, Sully is not a light movie or a superficial celebration of a hero. There’s no real villain in this story. The birds are just birds and the FTSB is doing its mandated job of trying to determine what happened and how to prevent such incidents in the future. Sully just wants to survive the investigation, go home and take a break.
Tom Hanks, as Sully, does his usual excellent job of portraying a character. I read that he spent some time with the real Sully in order to learn his mannerisms. His character is the center of the story. The rest of the cast, especially Aaron Ekhart and Laura Linney do their usual jobs of being capable actors, but they are not the center of the story. It’s mostly Hanks’s movie and it’s a memorable performance. Cinematography is quite good. The special effects used to create the crash are extremely believable…you are right there when it all happens, in the cockpit and the passenger cabin. Like my last review, Snowden, this is another ripped-from-the-headlines factual story; there are no surprises in the end. Nevertheless, Eastwood’s unblinking look at the story makes it engaging, suspenseful and enjoyable. You end with the feeling that everybody in the movie did their damnedest to tell the story and that the story is worth telling. After my adrenaline came back to normal, I really liked the film.