Sully: doing everything right and saying the wrong thing

Clint Eastwood comes back to our screens two years after American Sniper to tell us another American story. This time is the true story of the US Airways flight 1549, which, on February 15, 2009, was forced to land in the Hudson River after hitting several birds in the act of taking off from New York's LaGuardia Airport. 

The movie is centered on the figure of the captain, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the hero that saved everyone on that plane by taking the decision and then executing a bold water landing. In the movie, we go through the investigation of the accident and the struggles that captain Sully faced during that period. The hero is then haunted by doubts about himself and by the perspective of losing his pension after 40 years of service. 

Telling a true story on screen is always tricky, but Sully delivers with power every emotion, overcoming the fact that the viewer already knows the outcome of the story. I've enjoyed the movie, I felt a wide spectrum of emotions and it feels authentic. The actors are amazing and very well directed, the dialogues are powerful, and Aaron Eckhart should be forced to keep that glorious mustache till the end of time. Moreover, the narration of the events is very well designed, not giving us the scenes of big visual impact right away (like in the movie Flight), but rather delivered, one bit at a time, in different moments of the movie. 

The only flaw of the movie itself is a piece of dialogue that gave my nerves. It appears to me that the old Clint wants to remind the viewers that something else about planes crashing on New York happened in the recent past. Therefore, starting from the very first scene, we find images of how worse that accident could have been. At first, I tolerated the choice, since it is fitting with a PSTD of the pilot. Moreover, it could be the way of the director to say "everyone will think about 9/11 anyway, let's just ride the elephant in the room" (although I'm not sure about the first part and now we will never know). I ran out of tolerance when the issue was explicitly addressed with a phrase like "It has been a while since New York had good news, especially involving planes" (not a literal transposition). I found it inappropriate and it doesn't fit well in the movie.

Besides that, it is a very well executed movie, I fully recommend it because it is a good way to spend a couple of hours.

At last, I would like to address a message that the movie made me feel and to which I disagree with. The method used to represent the investigation, as well as the people whose duty (and let me stress duty) is to establish what went wrong and who is responsible, made me take a stand against the investigation itself. This is just wrong. In such accidents, the investigation is mandatory because you have also to decide if giving or not to the pilot (or the plane) the responsibilities for other human lives. It is true that the struggle and the self-analysis of the main character are saying that he trust the necessity of such investigation. However, from the choice of the actors (that always interpret annoying characters) to the dialogues, the feeling is that the investigators are the bad guys. I think this is simply the wrong message and I don't think that an expert director like Clint Eastwood did that by accident.