Casting NTSB investigators as bogeyman is a cheap shot but Eastwood and Hanks still pull off the feel good film of the year

Rating: 6/10 (9 October 2016)

As far as films about air disasters go, "Sully" is a difficult one to pull off. The flight itself lasted only five minutes—so how does director Clint Eastwood manage to keep our interest for the 96 minute length of the film? The introduction is certainly gripping—Eastwood imagines what would happen if Sully decided not to ditch the plane in the Hudson. The imaginary sequence of events depicts a disastrous crash into skyscrapers reminiscent of what happened on 9/11.
Instead of taking us to the airport right before the miraculous flight, Eastwood flash forwards to the beginning of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation where Sully's decision to ditch the plane is questioned by Board investigators. The first part of the investigation and its conclusion are book-ended into Acts One and Three of the film's narrative. Act Two is a recapitulation of the flight itself and the subsequent attendant rescue efforts.
The actual crash is quite gripping, chronicling exactly how the plane went down after a huge flock of geese took out both the plane's engines. Tom Hanks as the expert pilot doesn't quite exude the gravitas of the real Captain Sully but once the geese hit, the A-list actor manages to more than ably convey the machinations of a genius of the skies on autopilot.
For those who want more of the crash from different angles, the five minute anomaly is recapitulated in the third act through a series of flight simulations served up during the NSTB investigation. At first, it's posited that Sully had enough time to return to either LaGuardia or Teterboro airports. But once the human factor is added in, the additional seconds added into the simulation prove that the flight would have been doomed.
Sully only fails in its rather unconvincing attempt to create villains out of the NTSB investigators. In real-life, the investigation took 15 months; here it's condensed to a very short time. While the investigators were just "doing their job," here their aggressive probing suggests that they were out to "get" the intrepid Sully. The NSTB's statement regarding the film speaks volumes about Eastwood's attempt to make them the bad guys: "we were not afforded an opportunity to ensure our actions and words were portrayed with accurate context or reflected our perspective."
Sully probably should be probably nominated and declared winner of the "feel good" film of the year. In another sense, it can be viewed as the perfect "anti-9/11" film, as it depicts a happy ending involving an air crash. Eastwood has done a good job crafting a narrative with limited potential for drama. Casting the NTSB investigators as the bogeyman here was somewhat of a cheap shot, but necessary to ensure that the film had some kind of antagonist.