67.) Sully [10/15/2016]

This was an incredible story: a man lands a passenger jet full of people on the Hudson River between Manhattan and New Jersey. It was one of the few successful water landings and one of the few times a crash investigation could interview both the pilot and the co-pilot.

This story had a few complications which made it difficult to dramatize:
1) The whole incident took two minutes. All the action occurred in the average length of a commercial break during a TV show, so the movie had to take some liberties with the narrative. In Flight, as a contrast, the plane took a long time to crash, and that maneuver occupied a good chunk of the narrative time. Here, the entire flight from take off to forced water landing took two-hundred and eight seconds. While this fact makes it all the more impressive that Capt. Sullenberger acted with such confidence and poise, it hardly makes for an interesting movie alone. Which leads me to...
2) Capt. Sullenberger was a good man who did his job well. Again, to return to Flight, the dissonance between the character's flaws and his acts of heroism create a natural narrative tension. Here, no one was terribly surprised that Sully did such a good job. No one wants to see a movie where a good person does a good job without much struggle. Which leads me to...
3) The tension between the investigators and Capt. Sullenberger felt forced because he was such an excellent pilot and all the passengers survived. The movie seemed to suggest that overly stingy insurance regulators and reliance on technology called into question the heroism of the singular pilot who could have made that landing work.  I am not sure that actually happened. There is little to suggest that anyone would have questions Sullenberger's decision past the initial question. Because the audience could clearly see that a competent man with years of experience handled the situation with such confidence and decisiveness that everyone managed to live, the actors playing the investigators seemed cartoonishly villainous.

In the end, though, the story was well-told and well-performed. It was a naturally interesting story, and I wish the focus had been more on the trauma of the lived experience than the obviously staged battle over regulations and system testing. Still, it was well-worth seeing.