Eckhart is solid, literally playing his wing man, and sporting an impressive moustache that makes you think pilots wear them because they look like wings. Warner Bros releases it Friday. But in the aftermath of the landing, he has visions of the plane smashing into Manhattan buildings, he has dreams of news reporters questioning his judgment, and he confesses his doubts and fears in intimate telephone conversations with his wife Lorraine (Laura Linney, who spends almost every second of her screen time on the phone with Sully).
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Tom Hanks’ latest outing sees him become airline pilot Chesley Sullenberger, captain of a downed US Airways flight that found surprise midwinter solace on the Hudson River. To come across the garish makeup jobs of J. In 42 years of flying, he’d never experienced the failure of even one engine, let alone two. “Sully” is like the work of a man of 40. It’s also, at 96 minutes, rather short for latter-day Eastwood, whose movies nearly always run a touch over two hours.
Even Sully’s wife, Lorraine (Laura Linney), in the ever-annoying wife-in-waiting-role, is stronger and more balanced than the stock character.
Eastwood, at 86, continues to be a marvel, and this stands as one of the four-time Oscar winner’s best films – in fact, his best since Best Picture victor Million Dollar Baby.
Saturated with shots of Hanks as Sully staring forlornly at the Hudson River, wracked with guilt over the possibility that he could’ve made it to an airport and beset by nightmares amid a National Transporation Safety Board investigation, the movie attempts to approach things from a psychological perspective. He may want to be thought of as an outlaw warrior unafraid to say or do the wrong thing, but his characters certainly don’t. Sully is a movie in which Katie Couric plays herself interviewing Hanks as Sullenberger, because she interviewed the real Sullenberger seven years ago.
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In promotional clips for the movie “Sully”, which portrays the so-called Miracle on the Hudson water landing of a jetliner in 2009, there is little doubt about who the villains are: the accident investigators hounding the pilot after his splashdown. When audiences know how the story ends, they’re hesitant to plop down the price of admission to watch the inevitable. That makes for at least one spectacular CGI-fueled recreation, a tense sequence highlighted by the worry and resolve washing over Hanks’ face and that of his younger stalwart co-pilot, Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), as they realize the water is their best hope of survival. Oh, yeah, well, we went to the simulator, Tom and I in San Francisco and Clint was there and sully was there which was great and but, you know, flying those planes is hard. However, rather than pose Sully as that conclusion’s sole architect, Eastwood presents it as the result of a community – a city – coming together. Both films involve self-sacrificing captains subjected to a hard and unusual situation, in which they’re forced to make immediate life-threatening decisions, which could impact their passengers and crew. People come in from all angles, at high speeds, on the shortest of notice. Trust in the human element, Sully tells us, while tripping itself up in the technical details. Yes, they did – they were two of many.
