The film, which opens in theaters and on IMAX theaters nationwide on Friday, chronicles Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s and First Officer Jeff Skiles’ “Miracle on the Hudson” water landing, as well as the jarring aftermath as the pilots’ decision-making during the crisis comes into question.
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Still, Warner Bros. released a statement to Bloomberg from Sullenberger on the matter: “The story being told came from my experiences, and reflects the many challenges that I faced and successfully overcame both during and after the flight”.
Passengers in an inflatable raft move away from the Airbus 320 US Airways aircraft that went down in the Hudson River in NY on January 15, 2009. Mike O’Malley and Anna Gunn play the film’s accident investigators who were “trying to paint the picture that he had done the wrong thing”, says Eastwood in a behind-the-scenes video (included below). Still, if you continue to listen to the NTSB, they are annoyed by the fact that no one associated with the movie asked them for their side of Sully’s story, because by their accounts, they were nothing but respectful to the long-time pilot, and they did everything that they could to maintain the story line that Chesley Sullenberger acted heroically in the face of unprecedented danger. “Sully” is portrayed by Tom Hanks.
“I am very happy with the movie”.
“Everybody knows the story of what happened at ‘Miracle on the Hudson, ‘” Eckhart says of the script, written by Todd Komarnicki and adapted from Highest Duty by Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow. “You’re talking about a water landing, which in itself is an improbability, and then you’re talking about saving everybody’s lives”, Eckhart observed. “That narrative was laid on us by people who are enemies of our country; this is a story of heroism in New York City”. “At the time when we needed it, it gave people hope”. It issued 35 safety recommendations.
Could the plane have made it back to LaGuardia Airport if Sullenberger, portrayed by actor Tom Hanks, had turned it around?
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Without faulting Sullenberger, the NTSB report said the aircraft was going so slow in the final seconds of the flight that the pilots would have been in danger of losing control if not for the plane’s automated protections. Eastwood showed as much with 2014’s “American Sniper“, which, for all the debate it spurred, depicted some of the demons facing Navy SEAL sharpshooter Chris Kyle. There’s a special kind of magic about a NY story where the big city suddenly becomes a small town over some unusual or freak or serendipitous event, and Eastwood captures that.
