The movie Sully should not have worked. There’s a major event, which you almost certainly know about because they wouldn’t have made the film otherwise. You KNOW it has a positive outcome. The picture shows the event TWICE. And yet the audience is on pins and needles, both times, including me.
This is fine film making by director Clint Eastwood about airline pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) and his co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), where experience outweighs the machines. It is what happens when one man simply does his job every day in a professional manner. The one odd thing – and maybe this really happened – is that Sully’s dealing with his wife Lorrie are all on the phone, so one doesn’t get a real strong feel for her character.
The Wife and I saw Sully at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany last month and were happy to spend the 90 minutes. And I LOVED seeing the real people at the end, including many of the passengers.
Unfortunately, I read a lot of reviews before I saw the film. A few of those folks thought that the National Transportation Safety Board members were somehow persecuting Sully for his arguably risky maneuver. Whether it actually happened that way – movies based on real life are not supposed to be documentaries – I thought the questions from the NTSB folks were quite reasonable, in an attempt to learn for future situations. If they were a little too “villainous”, it served the story.
I got a great deal of enjoyment about the memes on Facebook about Tom Hanks in movies, that you wouldn’t want to travel with him, lest one be captured by Somali pirates (Captain Phillips), get stuck talking with a volleyball (Cast Away), get stuck in an airport (The Terminal), or get stuck in space (Apollo 13).