Sully

Went into this with a slightly different approach over on Letterboxd, but to me this is a quintessential movie that didn't need to exist for any other reason than that some sort of movie about the miracle on the Hudson needed to exist. Think about it.

There was a big and memorable event in real life, and we live in an age where we need to make all of the big and memorable events into movies, even though real life is as documented and widely seen as it ever has been.

But the problem with the miracle on the Hudson - from a cinematic standpoint - is that the whole thing happened in less than five minutes. So how do you stretch that out into a ninety-minute movie? Furthermore, what was notable and wonderful about this particular event was that it was a fucking plane crash in the middle of New York City (or rather, between New York City and the New Jersey portions of the New York metropolitan area) with about as little actual drama as you could imagine and hope for. "A very competent pilot successfully did his job, and the flight crew and passengers all cooperated, and an enormous rescue effort was launched and completed in, like, half an hour or so, and everyone lived and no one was even seriously hurt." That's great! That's, frankly, amazing! But that is not a movie.

So in order to make it a movie, Clint Eastwood and his crew need to really hammer home that, you know, maybe Sully wasn't actually a hero, but a reckless son of a bitch who made a very bad decision and then lucked into a flawless water landing. There were airports nearby, after all! And so Mike O'Malley is cast as this computer-humping dude who trusts simulations over experienced pilots, and boy does he want Sully's ass for this! And so thus the real drama in the film doesn't concern the actual event itself - again, five minutes long and thankfully tragedy-free, albeit very suspenseful - but instead, a courtroom hearing (or rough equivalent) in which Sully maintains he had no time to make it over to one of those other airports, now get your dang computers and engineers and fancy math out of my face already. (Clint Eastwood, ladies and gentlemen!)

But what are we left with? We're left with a movie where the suspense isn't about whether or not Tom Hanks can land that plane safely on the water, but instead about whether or not Tom Hanks can convince his bosses and himself that he had to land the plane on the water. So the most climactic scenes aren't, you know, the fucking water landings, but instead simulated airport landings that end up failing, vindicating our man Sully.

Isn't this all kind of self-defeating? Big event, okay, now let's make a movie about that big event, only it turns out the big event in no way supports an entire movie, entirely because everyone at every level was competent and in control the whole time, but it's hard to make a movie about competence and success, because there's really no drama there, so now instead our movie focuses on the question, "but wait, was Sully really a hero?" which is an interesting enough route to take if this is, in any way, a movie about how Sully was maybe not a flawless pilot, but it is emphatically not that movie, it is a movie meant to celebrate his heroics, but in order to do so we have to go through the charade of questioning his heroics in the first place. What? I don't doubt that Sully had to face an assload of scrutiny after the landing, but were the investigators actually out to nail him, or were they just taking their jobs - to find out anything and everything that leads to airline crashes so we can attempt to learn from our mistakes - very seriously? Did we have to make them bad guys? Did we have to make the essential conflict in this movie "Sully vs. everyone who questioned what he did?"

But here's the thing - of course we did, because in order to have a movie, or at least a movie with a big budget and Tom Hanks and Clint Eastwood, we need to have a conflict, because without a conflict there is no plot. So rather than just saying, "hey, you know what, maybe this isn't actually something we can make a movie out of," we collectively willed this thing into existence, and it needed "bad guys" beyond the birds the plane hit, and so why not make the investigators fill that role?

In short, then, they had to manufacture all of the conflict in a movie based on a real life event. Artistic license is one thing, but honestly - why make this movie? Why make this movie? If we're going to make shit up anyway, why base this movie on a real event with a real hero? What's wrong with a movie where it's Sully himself having doubts about whether or not he did the right thing, and then the investigation board confirms to him that he did, rather than putting him on trial for it?

Whatever. This just didn't need to be a movie! Except for the fact that - I know, I get it - someone had to make it a movie. At least it was decent! At least it wasn't bad!