Clint Eastwood’s Sully opens on the aftermath, not the landing, and that is the whole point. The film, written by Todd Komarnicki and based on Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow’s 2009 memoir Highest Duty, runs 96 minutes. Tom Hanks plays Sullenberger. Aaron Eckhart plays first officer Jeff Skiles. Laura Linney plays Sully’s wife, Lorrie.
The story is known before the first frame. On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 struck a flock of birds after leaving LaGuardia Airport, damaging both engines of the Airbus A320. Sully ditched the plane on the Hudson River. All 155 passengers and crew survived.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
A Ditching the Audience Already Knows
Eastwood does not build toward the water. He opens inside it, then loops back. The suspense is not the landing. It is the National Transportation Safety Board.
The film follows Sully through the publicity that trails the rescue — press attention aimed at him and at his family, aftereffects he cannot shake — and into an investigation that threatens his career. Preliminary data from ACARS suggest the left engine was still running at idle power. Theoretically, that engine had enough thrust to reach LaGuardia or Teterboro. The NTSB claims confidential computerized simulations confirm it, and says the results were verified across 20 different simulations.
Sully and Skiles insist otherwise. The board suspects pilot error. That finding, if it held, would destroy Sullenberger’s reputation.
Hanks Plays Restraint, Not Panic
Hanks is the reason this works. He plays Sully as a man who has already made his decision and will not perform the anxiety everyone expects of him. The performance is quiet in a way that could read as blank, and does not, because Hanks lets the doubt sit behind the eyes rather than in the voice.
Eckhart gets the better deal. Skiles is the one who says the thing out loud — the bewilderment, the anger, the disbelief that a successful ditching is being reframed as a failure. Eckhart plays him as loyal and hot, and the pairing holds the middle of the film together.
Anna Gunn, Holt McCallany, Jamey Sheridan and Valerie Mahaffey fill out the surrounding cast. Linney’s Lorrie is mostly a voice on the phone, a limitation the script never solves.
The Simulation Scene Is the Movie’s Argument
The centerpiece arrives late. Sully arranges to have the simulations rerun with live pilots, then relayed to the public. The reruns produce successful landings. Sully’s counterargument is that the simulations are unrealistic because they do not take human fact into account.
That is the film’s thesis in one scene, and it is a good one. A computer that knows the outcome and starts the clock at the moment of the bird strike is not measuring what a pilot measures. It is measuring hindsight.
The untold story behind the miracle on the Hudson.
The tagline promises a hidden story. What the film delivers is an argument about how an institution builds a case against a person who did the right thing under conditions no model captures.
Where Sully Missteps
The NTSB is the problem. The film portrays the board as prosecutorial and closed-minded, and that portrayal drew controversy on release. Watching it now, the objection holds up. The board here is not an agency doing a job; it is an antagonist with a grudge, and the screenplay gives it no interior life to complicate that.
The real investigators were not villains. A film this careful about flight mechanics is careless about the people on the other side of the table, and it costs Sully the moral complexity it seems to want.
The runtime is also tight to a fault. At 96 minutes, the film has room for the ditching, the investigation and the reruns, and almost nothing else. The aftereffects Sully experiences — the press attention, the strain on his family — get stated rather than shown. Lorrie’s frustration arrives in fragments.
A Cast of Real People Playing Themselves
One of the film’s better decisions is who it puts on screen. Vince Lombardi, the captain of the first ferry to reach the downed plane, appears as himself. Katie Couric appears as herself. David Letterman shows up via archive footage from the night he interviewed the real crew of Flight 1549, with the film’s actors digitally swapped in for their real counterparts.
During the credits, the real Sully and Lorrie speak to the actual passengers from the flight. It is a plain gesture and it lands harder than anything in the dramatized sections.
What Sully Gets Right
Ranked against Eastwood’s other recent work, Sully is disciplined in a way his weaker films are not. The three things it does best:
- The ditching sequence — staged with real procedural detail, no music swelling over the water.
- Hanks and Eckhart’s scenes in the investigation room, where the case against Sully is laid out and neither man backs down.
- The rerun sequence, which turns a bureaucratic hearing into the film’s actual climax.
Sully premiered at the 43rd Telluride Film Festival on September 2, 2016. Warner Bros. Pictures released it in the United States on September 9, 2016, in conventional and IMAX theaters. It grossed over $240 million worldwide. The American Film Institute and the National Board of Review each named it one of the ten best films of 2016, and it was nominated for Best Sound Editing at the 89th Academy Awards.
The Awards Record Tells You What This Is
The awards record confirms what the film is: a well-built, well-acted procedural with one strong idea, not a great one. The sound editing nomination is telling. The ditching is the film’s most accomplished sequence, and it is accomplished largely through sound.
Sully is a good film that mistakes its villain. The case it builds against its own hero is the most interesting thing in it, and the film cannot quite admit that the case was worth making in good faith. What remains is Hanks, Eckhart, and 96 minutes of a man being asked to justify the best thing he ever did.
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