Movie Review - Sully

   Alright, time for another film review. Airplane movies are cool. Let's try that. This time I watched Sully, a film about the real life US Airways flight 1549 that crash landed on the Hudson River without any loss of life. Is it any good?

   It's directed by Clint Eastwood and it stars Tom Hanks. What do you think?

   Our plot follows Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger, an experienced airline pilot who gained fame after successfully ditching a loaded passenger jet on a river in New York City in 2009. Despite his success, he is plagued by flashbacks and nightmares of his experience. What's more, Sullenberger and his copilot, Jeffrey Skiles, are under investigation by the NTSB who believe that the flight could have successfully landed at another airport and that the loss of the airplane was avoidable. There are moments where Sully gets fairly technical about the field of aviation, but it's far from unwatchable. The crash landing scenes – yes, they do play it out twice – are a thrill to watch, even though we already know how they turn out. Still, plotwise, this is a film that offers few surprises. This is probably the reason why the movie can sometimes feel like it's longer than just 96 minutes. In fact the only real thing that surprised me about this film is that it didn't end with a scene of Sully reuniting with his wife and kids (who we see talking to him on the phone several times). Instead it ends with a joke from Skiles. Dropped the ball there.

   As I said before, Clint Eastwood is in the director's chair, and his trademarks are clearly visible: charming/inspiring feel-good moments mixed with a bunch of US flags. Not overly stylistic, but capable nonetheless. The CG effects were good. At least they were better than the baby from American Sniper, right?

   The acting is all-round rather well done, especially from Hanks (Sullenberger) and Aaron Eckhart (Skiles) who portray pretty much the only three-dimensional characters in this film. It's not as if Sully really needed a multitude of characters to portray an event that lasted a few minutes.

   I have a feeling that the writers were really stretching for ideas here. While Sully's posters promised us “The untold story behind the Miracle on the Hudson”, I doubt there's much new stuff to be discovered from here. But on the whole, Sully is enjoyable enough. It isn't exceptionally good, but still pretty good.

Grade: three and a half stars out of five.