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It hasn’t even been 10 years since Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger bravely landed his suddenly-crippled passenger plane on the Hudson River and saved the lives of 155 people on board. The new film SULLY explores that incident, and some of the more controversial aspects that surrounded it. Directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Tom Hanks as the famed airline captain, it’s based on the book written by Chesley Sullenberger that recounts those events. What surprised me leading up to the film was some of the online criticism of Sully and the now famous day, stating things like him not really being a “hero” or the act itself not being heroic, and in many cases there are folks who doubt the water landing was even really necessary. Oddly enough the film actually addresses all of those concerns in a rather honest way.

Much of SULLY is told in flashback, opening with Sullenberger (Hanks) waking up from a nightmare the morning after the landing, and in that nightmare he imagined he actually crashed the plane in downtown New York. This is the intense beginning of some rather horrific visions Sully experiences after the successful water landing, and the chaotic media frenzy that followed. The film also makes a point to note that Sully and his co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) acted as best they could in a situation no one could have truly prepared for, and much of what they did was acting on impulse and personal knowledge rather than any existing protocol. The surrounding story elements involve the airline’s insurance company questioning whether or not the pilots did the right thing, and Sully’s wife (Laura Linney) helping him cope with the events by way of frequent phone calls, all while the media keeps making the captain out to be a much-needed hero in the eyes of the people.

Tom Hanks really does seem like the perfect actor to play Sully, and this portrayal is one of the more subdued of his career. After seeing him in the film, I can’t imagine anyone else pulling this off as well. His reading of Sullenberger has an everyman quality that’s quite easy to relate to – this is not a guy who walked around like some proud leader, he’s just a pilot doing his job caught in an extraordinary circumstance. Eastwood does a great job capturing the more human side of the characters shown in the story. The cast, which is a smart mix of semi-familiar faces and many fresh-faced performers, play their parts without an ounce of ego or pretension. No one is chewing up the scene, rather carrying their roles with sincerity. The film itself is not a traditional narrative either, as it’s more of dramatic documentation of select events surrounding one major story. This is one of the most criticized aspects of the production, as many have said the plane scenes are spectacular (and they are), but the movie itself feels like it’s lacking proper framing. But at 96 minutes, this is also the shortest film Clint Eastwood has directed to date, and that short running time sort of makes up for the lack of straightforward presentation. And despite that, there’s more than a few moments that will get you choked up at the gravity of it all. Even knowing how things end, there’s such intensity in revisiting the events of that day, it’s hard not to get emotional knowing what everyone went through. It’s easy to forget the peril didn’t stop with the water landing, the freezing temperatures that day made a speedy rescue essential, and every detail of what those passengers went through is explored quite well.

To me, this is a great way to look at the events that made Captain Sullenberger a household name, and I really appreciated the running theme of how the survival of everyone on that doomed flight was very much a group effort. Sully, as a character, never tries to take credit for the accomplishment, as he believes (rightfully so) that everyone there that day made it possible – the flight crew, the co-pilot, the passengers, the ferry boat captains and the New York rescue workers… every single one of them working together allowed for that day to play out the way it did. So if anything, this film shows how Sully was in fact a hero by never claiming to be one. Make sure to sit through the first half of the credits to see some current footage of the real folks involved, reunited together once more to celebrate their survival of that day. While SULLY may not be Eastwood’s best film to date, it is easily one of the most impressive in its execution.

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