Movie Reviews #36…
Sully. Clint Eastwood, dir. I went into this flick with foreboding, the kind you get when an editor tells you your short story must be between 4000 and 5000 words long, and you have 2500, or your old high school civics teachers tells you that you have to write a paper on the entire industrial revolution in five pages or less. How can anyone possibly make a two-hour film about an event that took only 200+ seconds to unfold? I was expecting long flashbacks about the main character’s past.
There was some of that. I learned that Sully’s stupid flight instructor left him, an immature kid, alone to fly a plane anytime he wanted while the instructor went back to his crop-dusting business (flight instructors aren’t the brightest people on the planet, of course, when you consider they trained the 9/11 terrorists—people running the flight schools aren’t either). I learned that Sully was some kind of military aviator too, landing a fighter that was clearly in trouble—an attempt by Eastwood to show Sully was well-prepared to ditch an Airbus on the Hudson? No doubt the man was qualified—no one flies for forty years, much of it with commercial airliners, including the Airbus—without being qualified, but the flashbacks were just unimportant fillers.
Moreover, I learned nothing about the copilot, and I found Jeff Skiles (or Aaron Eckhart, the actor who played him?—he also had two of the best lines in the movie) much more interesting than Sully (because he was played by Tom Hanks, who overacts in almost every film and is becoming typecast for these disaster films). In the movie Skiles doesn’t do much to create “the miracle on the Hudson” until he helps passengers out of the plane, but in real life? We’ll never know, because Sully wrote the book and served as consultant for the movie.
Also, the actor who plays the NTSB bald guy making Sully miserable (Mike O’Malley) does a great acting job making the moviegoer hate him, the quintessential Hollywood villain needed to make this into a witch (warlock?) hunt. There’s the rub: either the NTSB went after Sully on behalf of the airline (US Scareways) and insurance company as portrayed in the movie, in which case the public was kept in the dark (an ongoing theme even in the presidential elections), or Hollywood (Eastwood?) decided to add all this crap to get two hours out of 200+ seconds. In either case, it’s about the only way they could turn those few seconds into an interesting movie.
Whether fact or fiction (Eastwood insists they stayed close to the truth), this is an interesting movie. As in Don’t Think Twice (reviewed last week), Sully is a peek into that NYC spirit, in this case, coming together in time of need. Sully isn’t the main character here; NYC is. There would be no book, screenplay, or movie without those ferry captains and NYC’s first-responders. Sully landed the plane, to be sure, and I don’t want to diminish that. It was an amazing feat considering both engines were gone. He made the only possible choice as a first step in averting a tragedy.
It didn’t turn into a tragedy, though, because Newyorkers stepped in to save those passengers in record time. The movie appropriately came out the weekend we were honoring those lost in 9/11. As one union rep told the two pilots in the dark corridors of the hotel, Newyorkers had some good news about airplane crashes for a change—but those first-responders created it. And the celebratory mood of the Newyorkers was featured in the film too. If that NTSB inquisition took place as portrayed in the film, the witch-hunters sure missed all that. But whoever said the government or corporate interests can ever participate in the joy we feel about the good in human beings? You will feel some of that joy watching those 200+ seconds and the 20 minutes that followed that Hudson landing, the small portion of the movie that makes it all worthwhile. Sorry, Clint.
Some previews. I’ve seen a few trailers recently where the movies are obviously terrible. Maybe it’s true that any PR is good PR, but I just have to warn you. First up is another Tom Hank’s movie, Inferno, based on Dan Brown’s book, an author who continues to be stuck in his formulaic ways. In it, Dante’s creation becomes a prophecy. Sounds like a bad Schwarzenegger movie I once saw, but the governator usually under-acted, in contrast to Hank’s tiresome overacting.
Next up is Jack Reacher #2, Never Go Back, where the miscasting experienced in #1, Lilliputian Tom Cruise as Child’s six-six tough guy, continues in its feeble attempts to create a series that challenges Bourne (Child has become formulaic too—he should learn a bit from Bourne’s creator Ludlum). Warning to wannabe Reachers: don’t try to break the safety glass of a car with your fist. It’s not rigged like in Hollywood (heaven forbid the L. Ron Hubbard’s ETs would have to fix Cruise’s million-dollar hand!).
I hope these two films flop horribly—they deserve it. If you want to see a good sequel from Hollywood, see the recent minions movie—at least those little guys can act! So can Matt Damon, as Bourne, of course.
In libris libertas!
