Could have been something

Rating: 1/10 (23 November 2016)

SULLY, directed by Clint Eastwood is a true story made into a film surrounding Captain Chelsey Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) and his first officer (Aaron Eckhart) who save 155 passengers by landing their plane on the Hudson River, and also focuses on the aftermath they debate whether the plane could fly a little further and land safely on land without putting anyone in danger.
I don't remember a thing from 15th of January 2009. And with all the great reviews of this retelling I was hoping to learn and be entertained while doing so. Which I was, kinda?
When they were doing the hearings at the end of the film to see if it was possible to land safely on land as I briefly mentioned before, was where I had the most fun. And has a lot of suspense. Including the music playing, and all of these aspects made me really excited and worried at the same time for these people, the message at the end was really nice as well.
Eastwood's movies are very colourless as shown in J.Edgar. It made that movie very un interesting and boring and kind of hurt my eyes after watching it for a while, and I have never finished watching the movie. Sully isn't half as bad in colour choices as J. Edgar and actually helps the movie to give it more realism with the darker shades and tones.
The film is spoken all in a quiet tone, sometimes hard to understand, and doesn't give the movie much personality. But makes the film calming at times, which I liked. There are no scenes of people changing emphasis in speech, like yelling, having different speech types, (I guess), I find these breaking moments really important and makes the characters more fascinating.
Eckhart was an interesting character, and looked like he had more fun making this movie.
The wife was there to give us another reason to love Sully and shows us he has a family, but she just tags along. She makes some really stupid decisions.
Tom Hanks plays a suppressed everyday hero, and it was comforting being around him and Hanks gives the character a little bit more of a personal element to Sully, but not really an emotional side, or really a heroic side. He doesn't believe in himself and never takes a second to realise he did such a great thing. Because the media is everywhere he goes assessing him, recording his every move. He never wanted this life, so he thinks he made a bad decision in a way, there are bigger reasons he thought it was a bad decision but I won't spoil anything. And by this character he plays, Hanks feels very contained in this movie, I just wanted him to change his tone, spit out his words faster. Something. But never does.
There are scenes in the movie where Sully dreams up scenarios because he is, in a way, going crazy.
The same dream is shown at least twice in the movie that I can remember, the exact same crashing dream and landing scene. The scene in the second act of the movie where the plane is landed on the water is shown randomly after Sully falls into a dream at a pub. Not 100% sure, but it was something like that. All I remember is that it felt really out of place, when in the third act of the movie when he listens to the audio file of the event in a court hearing, the audio recorded in the plane shows us the exact same visual scene and in a better context, it made sense for it to be there!
There is really too many cuts from the past to the present to even more in the past. Once you get invested in one time period it jumps to a different one, and then when you like that time period, it jumps again. It would be a lot more convincing if it told it in a chronological order, except for the land itself. It was smart having it at the end. So the mixture of flashbacks and flash forwards in this movie didn't really work and was kind of jumbled throughout the movie. The movie lacks from the placing choices and ultimately made the rest of the flashbacks a little useless and annoying as it took us away from the personal story of Sully we were following.
Although at times was entertained, mostly in the third act, the entertainment value wasn't all there. And even though I enjoyed the movie, I'm not too sure if it should have been made into a movie in the first place. It was a little hard to make a story around the material Eastwood picked, because as it said in the real life and the synopsis of the film that all passengers survived, so it's not really a heart pounding when a person starts drifting away from the plane, when Sully said at the start of the movie that everyone is living. So unless you have amnesia these scenes won't be as frightening and thrilling as it could've been.
I enjoyed Sully and it had my whole family awed by the ending still days later after coming back from the cinema, in a positive way. This is a quiet movie, with good performances, with some great scenes that goes well with the soundtrack. The movie brings up questions that were intended to be unanswered. So is this movie good? Definitely. Is this movie great? Kinda. Is it a masterpiece? Not in my eyes. Too many faults and missed opportunities for me to really call it a great movie, but I enjoyed it, and I think you will too.
Overall : B-