Sully Review

With most movies — even predictable ones — there's some basic level of suspense keeping you at the edge of your seat.  Since most of us know the outcome of the miracle on the Hudson, though, this film is a little different.  This is one of those movies that you hold up as an example of why you don't need suspense to keep a movie interesting.  The focus of Sully lies more in educating the viewer on this historic plane crash and what happened afterward.  The story is known to us; the exact details are not.  One should go into this looking forward to learning more about the miracle on the Hudson.

So what Clint Eastwood presents us with is an experience that's meticulously researched.  He does everything to be realistic, and to capture the technical aspects of the airline industry.   It's not uncommon for films based on true events to embellish things, or change some details for the sake of making things work better on camera, but going from the general feeling that I get, a lot of the details here feel more like they were put in out of loyalty to real-life rather than out of need for added drama.  Very little in this film — save for one exception that I'll get to later — feels like it came from a film-maker's imagination.  I really felt like I was watching airline pilots, and not some romanticized version of them.

It should be noted that the title of this film is Sully, and not The Miracle on the Hudson, and the film isn't strictly about the plane crash itself.  The plane crash itself is a very simple story that can't take up a whole film.  Rather, the main story of Sully is that of the aftermath, and the investigation from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to figure out for the record what went wrong, and what could have been done differently.  The stakes for Sully are very personal — his job is on the line if its proven that he put his passengers at a greater risk by landing in the Hudson instead of trying to make it to a nearby runway.

Of course, we know that the investigation comes out in Sully's favor, otherwise this movie wouldn't exist, and Clint Eastwood would have cast the villainous Ralph Fiennes to play Sully instead of the noble persona of Tom Hanks.  Like I said, this film doesn't have much suspense, but it manages to stay dramatic.  Perhaps that drama is a little bit of a problem, though, because this is the one area of the film that's dramatized.  In order to give this film conflict, the NTSB is cast in a negative light.  Their routine investigation is depicted as though it were a prosecution, determined to blame Sully for endangering the passengers and strip him of his career and dignity.  They were way too willing to assume negative things about him, and their arguments against his heroism were weak and very obviously overlooked certain details, which the film mentions.  It was bad enough that the real Chesley Sullenberger, who otherwise really liked the film, asked for the names of those heading the NTSB investigation to be changed so as not to defame them.

Perhaps the most eggregious part of this dramatization is that Sully depicts the investigation as being hasty, lasting for only a few days, when in real life the NTSB was much more cautious and objective, taking eighteen months to investigate the plane crash.  For the life of me, I don't understand why the screenwriter changed this.  Sully is a short movie, and there isn't much space to give Sullenberger a character arc.  It would have made more sense to show how this investigation affected him over the course of a year and a half.  It would have even been more dramatic to watch the tension build up in the titular character over time.  For whatever reason, Clint Eastwood didn't throw the script back at Todd Komarnicki and tell him to make the investigation longer and meatier, not to mention more accurate.  He didn't, and I don't understand that.

Aside from that major flaw, I also had mixed feelings about the flashbacks.  There were a couple of flashbacks from Sullenberger's younger years that didn't feel necessary at all, and his PTSD hallucinations of the plane crashing felt like they were put in there just to appeal to the visual medium, and hallucinations are a pet peeve of mine.  If Captain Sullenberger really did have PTSD, though, which is likely enough, I'd be okay with the latter of these two minor issues.

Overall, it's a fairly good drama that I didn't regret watching.  While the screenplay has some faults, Clint Eastwood makes a lot out of it, and his directing is easily the best part of this movie.  Do I think that Sully is as good as American Sniper?  Not so much.  I definitely like the longer time frame for that story, but of course that movie had its faults, too, so I can't say that it's objectively better.  Besides, there's something unique and refreshing about watching a drama that's so short and to-the-point, which makes it a perfectly paced film.  Certainly, Sully is a well-edited film, and it's easy enough to watch that I might very well watch it again when it comes out on DVD.