Sully (2016)

SULLY  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Clint Eastwood
    Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney,
    Jamey Sheridan, Valerie Mahaffey, Anna Gunn
On January 15, 2009, an American Airlines jet with 155 people on board took off from La Guardia Airport in New York. Almost immediately, the plane struck a flock of birds, knocking out both engines. With La Guardia and airports in New Jersey out of reach due to the plane's low altitude. the pilot, Chesley Sullenberger decided his best (and really only) option was to take advantage of the long, smooth, flat, but watery surface of the Hudson River. In what came to be known as the "Miracle On the Hudson," he nailed the landing and all 155 passengers survived. The total elapsed time between the bird strike and the landing on the Hudson: 3 minutes and 38 seconds. That's fast work. Clint Eastwood's movie about the event tells the story of the flight and its aftermath, as Sully and his co-pilot, Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), face a National Transportation Safety Board hearing in which they're more or less put on trial for what they did. Tom Hanks plays Sully, and it's not hard to see a parallel between this and the last reel of "Captain Phillips", with a Hanks hero again surviving a perilous ordeal and then going through some sort of PTSD. Whether the NTSB panel was as antagonistic as it's portrayed here, I couldn't say. The hostility doesn't make much sense, but it serves a purpose dramatically, allowing Eastwood to stack the deck against uncaring bureaucrats and in favor of his beleaguered protagonist. He cranks up the tension about an incident whose outcome we already know by keeping the focus on the people involved. The writing is functional. The landing and rescue are hair-raising. The effects are relatively modest. The human element never gets lost.