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Unlike real life, ‘Sully’ doesn’t crash

Sullenberger (Hanks) and Skiles (Eckhart) prepare for the public hearing after the accident. (Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

Owen Johnson
Connector Staff

Even at eighty-six years old, Clint Eastwood proves that he is still all there when it comes to filmmaking.

Based around the event that became known as the Miracle on the Hudson, “Sully” focuses on Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberg (Tom Hanks) and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), two airline pilots who are forced to land US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River after a flock of birds jammed both engines. Following the near disaster, questions are raised as to whether Captain Sully’s actions were the right choice.

To make a decent movie based on a historical event, you need at least one of two things: you need an interesting figure to follow or you need an interesting event to base the movie around. The character of Sully as he is written is not very interesting, so that leaves the event to keep the movie flowing.

There are two events that the plot deals with. The first event, which is presently occurring, details the aftermath of the emergency landing. This half of the movie is easily overshadowed by the flashback sequences that depict the plane landing in the Hudson, which is nearly perfect. Alone, either one of these stories would not work well for a feature-length movie. The plane’s landing and the rescue of the passengers and crew would be too short to fill a movie’s needed runtime, and only focusing on the follow up investigation would make it seem like it could be about any airline-based irregular situation. By merging the two events, the story manages to work and be interesting enough to warrant a movie based on them.

Despite the masterful handling of the events, the movie does fall prey to some pointless ideas and ridiculous clichés. There are multiple points in the film where Sully has hallucinations and dreams of the plane crashing, which all come off as pointless and dumb. There is also a “House M.D.” style moment where Sully gets an idea of how to handle the investigation based on hearing or thinking of something. The strangest of these moments is right at the end of the movie, where Skiles makes a joke about how he wishes everything had taken place in the summer, and the movie just ends right then and there.

While Eastwood is a master when it comes to directing his actors and how the story of the movie is handled, he does have a problem when it comes to sound editing. Many lines of dialogue are almost impossible to hear, and I know it isn’t the actors faults because this occurs on and off for both Hanks and Eckhart.

Though there are some minor slip ups scattered all throughout the movie, “Sully” is a step up from Eastwood’s last movie, “American Sniper,” and is one of only two movies I’ve seen this year that I could deem as above average.

Final Grade: B

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