Brace for impact

Rating: 6/10 (18 September 2017)

Chesley Sully Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) and his co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) get into difficulties with their aircraft shortly after take-off when a flock of birds fly head on at the aircraft resulting in damage to both engines. Sully makes the difficult decision to land the plane on the Hudson river as he does not believe that he will make it back to the airport (despite air traffic control advising him to head back to LaGuardia). Sully is branded a hero for his actions by the public, but his superiors don't see things this way and begin trying to build a case against Sully...
I remember hearing about this case on the news but was shocked that it happened as long ago as 2009 - I thought it happened more recently than that. My how time flies (no pun intended). On that basis and due to what little knowledge I had of the incident, I did find Sully to be interesting and fairly informative and it was also nicely balanced with enough exposition to get a reasonable understanding of the events and the aftermath (without ever getting boring) and it also had a few sequences showing the plane getting into difficulties which made it quite nervy and tense at times. These things serve the film well and make it worth watching, but for me despite these big positives I just felt as though something was missing..
Whilst it is informative and tense, the film is also quite cold and the film never seems to do much to draw me into Sully and Skiles' world; considering how often the word 'human' is used I couldn't help but feel that rather ironically the film lacked something in the way of a 'human' touch. Sully and Skiles aren't given much development and at no point do we seem to get any insight or understanding of how they are feeling or what thoughts are going through their heads?? This meant that the film lacked a bit of depth and felt a bit superficial at times. The film also clumsily throws in a scene where Sully and Skiles are both appearing on David Letterman which not only served no real purpose but it also felt oddly out of sink with the rest of the film. The same could be said for the scenes showing Sully in his early days as a pilot which added very little to the story and seemed to only exist as filler.
Despite some weaknesses, Sully is still worth watching as it has an interesting story and at just a shade over 90 minutes long it gets the job done fairly painlessly. For me though its cold delivery and the rather poor character development offered up here prevents it from being as great as it could have been.