‘Sully’: Brace for emotional impact of Tom Hanks’ cockpit triumph 
 
 It remains one of the indelible images of the 21st century. 
 
 On a frigid January morning in 2009, dozens of passengers found themselves perched on the wings of US Airways Flight 1549 — in the Hudson River. 
 
 Well. ON the Hudson River. 
 
 Just a few minutes after takeoff, the plane was struck by a flock of Canadian geese, rendering both engines powerless and necessitating a return to LaGuardia Airport — but when it was determined there wasn’t enough time to reach LaGuardia or any other nearby runway, the plane made an emergency crash landing on the water, and miraculously, all 155 passengers and crew survived. 
 
 At the helm of Flight 1549 was one Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who within 24 hours became one of the most famous American pilots this side of Charles Lindbergh. 
 
 It seems almost a foregone conclusion Clint Eastwood would direct and Tom Hanks would star in the movie version of the story. (Can you think of a better starting battery? I can’t.) 
 
 As accomplished as they are, it would be an understatement to say Eastwood and Hanks meet expectations. This isn’t just a solid piece of work; it’s resonant. 
 
 The 86-year-old Eastwood gives us an electrifying thriller, a wonderful in-depth character study and a fascinating airline safety procedural, while Hanks delivers another in a long line of memorable, nomination-worthy performances. 
 
 (Sidebar: How is it Tom Hanks hasn’t been nominated for an Oscar since 2001 with “Castaway”? Could it be the Academy has fallen into a pattern of taking his comfortable, outwardly effortless genius for granted?) 
 
 “Sully” begins with the immediate aftermath of the water landing, with Hanks’ Sully and his co-pilot, Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart in one of his most measured and authentic performances), seemingly barely dried off being soaked in the icy waters of the Hudson when they have to face down a skeptical group of inquisitors from the National Transportation Safety Board, including Mike O’Malley as Charles Porter and Anna Gunn from “Breaking Bad” as Dr. Elizabeth Davis. 
 
 From the get-go, it’s clear some on the panel believe Sully might have panicked and actually had enough engine power and enough altitude and time to get back to an airport. They ask Sully questions about how much sleep he had before the flight, when he had his last drink — and if he was experiencing any problems at home. 
 
 They’re looking for chinks in the armor of a man who was already being hailed as a hero in the media and who seemed a bit uncomfortable under the lights, but didn’t say no to David Letterman or Katie Couric or plenty of other interview opportunities. 
 
 Eastwood directs with his usual economical style. (Even his longest-running films rarely seem to waste our time with overlong scenes of exposition, or unnecessary supporting characters.) We learn a little about Sully’s love of piloting and his resourcefulness in times of crisis via a couple of flashback scenes, and we’re introduced to a handful of flight attendants and rather thinly sketched passengers, including two adult sons and their beloved old pops, a young woman with a baby and a grown woman and her elderly mother. 
 
 Mostly, though, “Sully” is about Sully. Hanks is so good he could play this character in a one-man show with nothing but a chair and a telephone onstage and it would be riveting. 
 
 On the surface, Sully is a calm, cool, no-nonsense, self-effacing veteran of some 42 years as a pilot. But in the aftermath of the landing, he has visions of the plane smashing into Manhattan buildings, he has dreams of news reporters questioning his judgment, and he confesses his doubts and fears in intimate telephone conversations with his wife Lorraine (Laura Linney, who spends nearly every second of her screen time on the phone with Sully). 
 
 Eventually, at just the right time, “Sully” takes us through those harrowing, incredible 208 seconds when Flight 1549 is struck by those birds, and the engines burst into flames before dying out, and Sully and Skiles react in the cockpit, and the flight attendants repeatedly command, “Heads down, stay down, heads down, stay down!” and a commercial aircraft rapidly sinks in the skies above New York City (of all places) and eventually splashes down on the Hudson. 
 
 The editing and the special effects and the performances are so pitch-perfect, this is as close as you’d ever want to come to being on that flight on that January day. 
 
 “Sully” is an absolute triumph. 
 
 ★★★★ 
 
 Warner Bros. Pictures presents a film directed by Clint Eastwood and written by Todd Komarnicki, based on the book “Highest Duty” by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. Running time: 95 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for some peril and brief strong language). Opens Friday at local theaters. ||||| Tom Hanks stars as hero pilot Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger in “Sully,” a film directed by Clint Eastwood. (Keith Bernstein/Warner Bros. Pictures) 
 
 After a summer of bombast and belly-flops, the fall movie season gets off to a refreshingly sure-footed start with “Sully,” a four-square, upstanding, rock-solid example of filmmaking at its most direct and honestly affecting. 
 
 Tom Hanks plays Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who landed a plane bound from LaGuardia airport to Charlotte on the Hudson River in 2009, after his craft was struck by a flock of Canada geese. But this is no simplistic tale of heroism and crack timing — although they’re in there. Instead “Sully,” which Clint Eastwood directed from a script by Todd Komarnicki, introduces viewers to a man wracked by second thoughts and nightmare visions of what could have happened had he made the wrong decision. What’s more, he’s not the only one with doubts: The film’s framing device is an investigation held by the National Transportation Safety Board, whose extensive simulations and computer algorithms suggested that Sullenberger probably had the engine power and time to make a safe landing back at LaGuardia, or in New Jersey. 
 
 For audiences whose image of Sullenberger is the paragon of modesty and skill, aw-shucks-ing it through interviews with Katie Couric and David Letterman, this part of his story will come as a revelation, and an infuriating one at that: It seems impossible that anyone could second-guess a pilot whose 40-year career was so exemplary that he was known in the field as a safety expert. This alternative glimpse, as well as Eastwood’s graceful staging of Sully’s darkest what-if fantasies, as well as the landing itself, makes “Sully” thoroughly engrossing and exciting to watch, even though viewers know the outcome. 
 
 
 
 Sullenberger flies with first officer Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), left. (Warner Bros. Pictures) 
 
 Sporting a head of cropped white hair and a modest mustache, his face a sallow mask of discomfort with sudden fame and attention, Hanks is the perfect actor to play Sullenberger, whose reserve and low-key assuredness may remind the audience of the title character the actor played a few years ago in “Captain Phillips.” There are laughs to be had in “Sully,” especially in the banter between Sullenberger and first officer Jeff Skiles, played with bristling, barely contained energy by Aaron Eckhart. But there’s nothing gratuitously ingratiating in a movie that instead goes to great pains to adopt the terse, economical work ethic of its protagonist. (Sully joins Sam Shepard’s Chuck Yeager and Ed Harris’s John Glenn in the pantheon of cinematic air heroes: taciturn, inherently trustworthy men of action, not showboating.) 
 
 Beautifully filmed in and around a wintry Manhattan, and featuring spectacular sequences re-creating that iconic landing and rescue on Jan. 15, “Sully” is also suffused with a particularly mournful sense of poignancy; the sight of a plane coming so perilously close to the buildings along the Upper West Side can’t help but conjure the city’s most grievous day eight years earlier, an observation made late in the film by one of Sully’s colleagues. (New York deserves a happy ending, he tells him, especially one involving planes.) 
 
 It’s fitting that “Sully” is arriving in theaters on the 15th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, a date that hovers around the proceedings like a tender, ghostly presence. Eastwood and his team not only pay fitting homage to Sullenberger, but to the squads of first responders who did their jobs so heroically on both days. “Sully” is a classy, enormously satisfying ode to simple competence. To paraphrase the title character, it’s just a movie doing its job. And amen to that. ||||| When the movie Sully opens in theaters today, Tom Hanks will stand in as the eponymous hero whose 2009 splash-landing in the river—aka the “Miracle on the Hudson”—turned US Airways Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger into an instant celebrity. Directed by Clint Eastwood, it has all the elements of a gripping story: a terrifying near-disaster, in which everyone mercifully survives. 
 
 But the filmmakers faced one big problem: Where’s the suspense? The facts are well-known: The flight itself lasted all of four minutes—from take off at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, to that unlucky collision with a flock of geese that took out both engines , after which passengers endured a heart-stopping ride as Sully and his co-pilot Jeff Skiles made the call to ditch the Airbus A320 in an icy Hudson River rather than return to the airport. The evacuation and water rescue took only 24 minutes, as ferries and other vessels in the area quickly came to the rescue. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation and public hearing that followed were anticlimactic—the crew, including the three flight attendants on board, had done the right thing, according to the board's final report. 
 
 That’s, well, kind of boring. Director Eastwood has admitted that he needed a villain. “Where’s the antagonist?” he reportedly asked when approached about the project. Sully’s best-selling book, Highest Duty , was more inspirational than a tell-all, and offered no candidates for the role of black hat. So the filmmakers solved their no-drama problem, in true Hollywood fashion , by making one up. 
 
 Actually, they made up an entire band of baddies: a glowering tribunal of investigators who torment Sully and Skiles for days immediately after the accident, not just questioning their decisions, but contradicting their accounts. While they’re identified in the film as NTSB officials, that’s where the resemblance to reality ends. These celluloid NTSB sleuths are fictional characters—an odd twist, given that almost all the other people depicted on screen, like passenger Jim Stefanik, and air traffic controller Patrick Harten, who took Sully’s mayday call, are real people identified by their actual names. 
 
 Dramatic, yes. Factual? As one source connected to the NTSB put it: 'The basic premise of the film is simply inaccurate.' Share via Pinterest SHARE THIS QUOTE 
 
 When the film’s pilots are shown in their first interview with the feds, the plot quickly strays from the well-known narrative. The so-called “lead investigator Charles Porter,” played by Mike O’Malley as a snarling Torquemada, immediately pounces on Sully and Skiles about alcohol and drug use, and follows that with claims that “engineers” and simulations of the flight revealed that they could have gotten the plane safely back to LaGuardia. Better yet: One engine still had power. Sully and Skiles are shocked, traumatized; Sully fears losing not just his reputation, but his whole livelihood: "I've got 40 years in the air, but in the end, I'm going to be judged on 208 seconds." And so it goes, for much of the movie’s 96-minute run. 
 
 Dramatic, yes. Factual? As one source connected to the NTSB put it: “The basic premise of the film is simply inaccurate.” 
 
 In fact, the NTSB was never consulted or even contacted by anyone connected with the film, a spokesperson confirms. There’s no one named Charles Porter at the agency and his two film colleagues, "Ben Edwards" and "Elizabeth Davis," played by veteran actors Jamey Sheridan and Anna Gunn, are also phony. Meanwhile, drug and alcohol tests of the crew were done right after the accident, and turned up nothing; by the same token, it’s also perfectly reasonable—and in fact standard procedure—for the interviewers to ask about that as well as any personal or financial problems the crew may have been experiencing. The simulations of the flight, done in cooperation with the plane’s manufacturer, were months away; and when they were in fact done, the results tilted in the pilots’s favor. 
 
 I reached out to the lead investigator in the case, Robert Benzon, who is now retired after a 27-year career with the agency; this was his last major air crash investigation. Did it bother him that the real NTSB people weren’t portrayed as themselves? “To be honest, I am kind of glad I’m not mentioned by name,” he tells Condé Nast Traveler. “Especially if the idea is to portray us as some kind of vindictive, out-to-get-‘em star chamber inquisition.” 
 
 When we spoke, Benzon had yet to see the film, but what he’s gleaned from the trailer and other reports have him concerned. “The NTSB treated Captain Sullenberger and his fellow crewmembers very benignly, as we always did in the many other major investigations with crew interviews,” he says. In fact, by the time the NTSB conducted interviews, “they were international heroes,” he adds. “As a result, we were even more deferential." 
 
 Other details are ironically off: An exterior shot of where the NTSB hearing is being held shows the Federal Aviation Administration headquarters—the two agencies are quite distinct and separate, and they are often at odds over how quickly to move on safety reforms. And in the movie’s depiction of the first “interrogations,” (that’s the movie studio’s description—the NTSB calls them “interviews”), the pilots are always shown together; agency procedure is to interview all crewmembers and witnesses separately, according to Benzon. In scenes of the hearing itself, the pilots confront the cockpit voice recording of the flight for the very first time. In fact, pilots are always given a chance to listen to it privately, usually well before the hearing, and the audio is never played in any type of public forum. (Printed excerpts of the dialogue were displayed at the actual hearing to accompany a video recreating the flight.) 
 
 These are minor quibbles, Eastwood might say. And don’t all docu-dramas take some creative license? A disclaimer at the end of the film does acknowledge a condensed timeframe for dramatic effect. Still, Benzon is concerned that showing the NTSB as a bunch of callous and self-serving bureaucrats could damage the public’s respect for the process—and could even be detrimental to aviation safety. “Pilots who see the movie might think we come in with preconceived notions, and they’ll be reluctant to cooperate” in future investigations, he says. 
 
 Asked about the NTSB criticism, Warner Brothers declined to answer questions, as did Sully himself and his co-pilot Skiles, who is back in the cockpit and now a captain for American Airlines. Sully has talked and written about the stresses he experienced post-accident and the self-doubts he experienced, and his worries over the results of the NTSB probe are undoubtedly genuine. But anyone who wants to see the real story of the investigation can read the full transcript of the hearing online . Another spoiler alert: It’s pretty dull. 
 
 As for the movie itself: I saw it, in an IMAX theater (bring some Dramamine if you see that version). It actually felt like I watching two films. The half that depicts the flight itself and the rescue, as well as Sully’s nightmares reliving the event, is riveting, with strong performances and impressive special effects. The rest? Even if you know nothing about the NTSB or aviation safety, it feels too long and somehow unsatisfying. Like your typical coach flight, maybe?
– Sure, there was plenty of "hero sex," but the aftermath of the Miracle on the Hudson wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. It's that story Clint Eastwood has chosen to tell in Sully, starring Tom Hanks as pilot Chesley Sullenberger. Here's what critics are saying: Richard Roeper at the Chicago Sun-Times calls it "an absolute triumph." It's "an electrifying thriller, a wonderful in-depth character study and a fascinating airline safety procedural." Hanks, meanwhile, "is so good he could play this character in a one-man show with nothing but a chair and a telephone onstage and it would be riveting." "That it unnerves you as much as it does may seem surprising, given that going in, we know how this story ends." But Eastwood is "very good at his job, a talent that gives the movie its tension along with an autobiographical sheen," writes Manohla Dargis at the New York Times. In particular, he offers "a master class in direction" during the accident scene, while Hanks makes a perfect Sully. Stephen Whitty at NJ.com says the accident scene is "the best part of the film," but he's not so enthralled with the rest of it. Basically, he concludes "there's not enough story" to warrant a feature-length film. Flashbacks to Sully's youth "add nothing but time," while the National Transportation Board Safety Board investigation delivers no drama or suspense, he adds. Ann Hornaday doesn't agree. Sully is "a four-square, upstanding, rock-solid example of filmmaking at its most direct and honestly affecting," and is "thoroughly engrossing and exciting to watch," she writes at the Washington Post. "To paraphrase the title character, it's just a movie doing its job. And amen to that."