Clint Eastwood’s Sully is a movie with an interesting challenge: It’s a disaster movie about a disaster that wasn’t, with a central crisis that occupied just a few short minutes of real life and ended happily for everyone. Eastwood is telling the story of US Airways Flight 1549 and its captain, Chesley Sullenberger, who coolly steered his plane into the Hudson River after a bird strike and landed smoothly enough on the frigid water that every passenger survived. It’s a justly famous story — but is it story enough?
The answer is: not quite enough to make a good movie, but enough to make an often riveting one. Eastwood and his screenwriter fill in a story around the water landing that raises questions about Sully’s heroism and judgment. It turns out that maybe he and his co-pilot (Aaron Eckhart) could have made it safely back to LaGuardia or forged ahead to Teterboro, and that the Hudson splashdown was therefore a form of pilot error. Or so argue a clutch of suits from the National Transportation Safety Board, who grill Sully in between appearances on Letterman and suggest that, while he may have saved 155 passengers and crew, it was also his fault they were endangered in the first place.
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