Not your usual over-dramatised film, but brilliant in it's own way

Rating: 8/10 (15 September 2016)

Sully is a film about a plane crash in New York (not 9/11)
The events of 'The Miracle on the Hudson' occurred about 7 years ago, which is fairly recent (as far as major plane crashes go). This means that, while it was a bit of time ago, almost the entire target audience of the film has some sort of memory of what occurred, considering it was news that spread very quickly across the entire world.
Immediately this puts Sully in a bit of a tricky situation. In order to make a good story, there needs to be conflict, but if the events are changed too much, then the audience will be able to tell, which then breaks immersion – something a director wants to avoid at all costs (unless you're shooting Deadpool of course). A film like Saving Private Ryan can take creative liberties with it's story and still seem as though it's based in WW2, but Sully can't do such a thing because then it would just be a film about a plane crash, not specifically the one that occurred in 2009. So the film needs to strike a very fine balance between the accurate depiction of events and an intriguing story – between documentary and drama.
Sully gets the first part right, with a very accurate recreation of the crash. Almost all the details are covered excellently, from the conversations with the flight control tower to how many times the crew went through the aircraft to look for remaining passengers. It also helps that the film was based off of the Chesley Sullenberger's book "The Highest Duty". Even the sound design is remarkably accurate and especially aircraft sounds which are generally very difficult to record faithfully, and the decision to keep music to a minimum means that the events shown feel raw and unprocessed, as though it was filmed during the actual crash. All this really helps with the immersion during the crash sequences. There was one noticeably oversight though, in one of the shots a poster for The Revenant is visible which is a bit distracting considering The Revenant was released in 2015 and the film is set in 2009.
So it's a real shame that despite the efforts that Eastwood made to keep sequences realistic and true to the actual event, the VFX really lets it down. In a few shots it is perfectly fine, and seems completely believable, but there are more than a few shots where it looks like something out of Air Crash Investigations rather than actual footage of a plane in the sky. Most of this is likely caused by a somewhat inaccurate simulation of the slightly different Raleigh scattering present in New York skies, which means that the CGI planes look a bit too shiny and clean – more like a toy model than a real aircraft.
Visually, Sully has fairly decent cinematography. The use of IMAX cameras for many sequences adds a subtle intensity to the film that wouldn't normally be present on smaller formats. There are a few questionable shot choices, but overall it complements the way the film was edited and also the restrained use of music. Something that really stood out (in a good way) was the way the crash scene was filmed. Not using a Bourne style camera movement in the (relatively) high intensity scene visibly helps strengthen the captain's point of view (which I won't say, cause spoilers).
Now the second, and arguably more important, part is the story and how it was handled. The main problem with it in Sully is that the writers were tasked to create conflict even when there wasn't really much conflict in the first place. It is after all a film about a plane crash and part of the investigation following, there isn't really much of a complication in the story. And the inability to take some creative freedoms in the writing meant that even the little conflict they tried to produce didn't have any tangible stakes – if the 'bad guys' won there wouldn't be much problems for the pilots. Still, the film was edited well enough that there was a coherent flow from each scene to the next, and the choice of editing in a non-linear style meant that the film didn't become too predictable or that information wasn't too easy to find. Despite the film inherently having a weak story, Sully manages to make itself interesting in more than a few ways.
Another thing of note is the wonderful acting in the film. Tom Hanks really shows why he is a first-rate actor, giving a completely believable performance as the captain of the flight. Aaron Eckhart also manages to bring to life his character of a younger co-pilot and the two main characters balance each other out wonderfully, giving life to the film. Surprisingly, the extras also seemed to be quite capable. While it was nothing compared to Hank's work, they were good enough in their (small) roles that it wasn't a distracting element.
Overall I think Clint Eastwood made the right compromises and managed to balance the accuracy of the event and the narrative of the film – if it was more 'factual' it would have been a dramatized documentary, if it had a stronger story the film would have been less accurate and that would have been quite distracting. Maybe in a few decades if the film was to be remade there could be some more liberties taken with the story, but given the circumstances, Sully is a wonderful, very natural feeling re-enactment of 'The miracle on the Hudson'.
8.2/10