BEFORE: Tom Hanks carries over again from "Bridge of Spies". Just one more film and the Movie Year 9 will be over. I'm gonna bring this year in for a landing, just like...oh, if only there were some kind of metaphor for how I'm gonna stick the landing on this one. Maybe something will come to me.
THE PLOT: The story of Chesley Sullenberger, an American pilot who became a hero after landing his damaged plane on the Hudson River to save the flight's passengers and crew.
AFTER: They just couldn't resist doing one of those "Fractured Timeline" things with Sully's story - it makes me wonder why they couldn't just have started with the plane taking off on that January day, and letting the audience experience the event in (somewhat) real time, or at least in the proper sequence. Instead they felt they had to start with the follow-up investigation of the incident, and then at some point they flashback to show the events of the day in question.
I guess the reasoning is as follows: if they wanted to cover both the incident and the aftermath, then the climax of the story, which is the landing and the ensuing rescue effort, and then the TSA investigation and the ways in which Sully was regarded as a hero, then the most exciting part of the story would come way too early in the movie. One might imagine that even with some padding, then the crash (sorry, "water landing") would happen at the midpoint of the film at the latest, then it would be a long, hard slog through the boring third act. So instead they moved the best, most accurate account of the incident, aka "the reveal" to happen shortly near the end, while the investigators and an audience are all listening to the flight recordings together. It's a very sneaky way to move the most climactic moment of the story to where one might expect to find it in a narrative film, which is shortly before the ending.
But as a result, that means that excessive flashbackery ends up fracturing the narrative here, it's not a straight shot from start to finish, and as a whole, the use of this as a storytelling device has been much too prevalent in recent years. I bet that in next week's wrap-up, if I count up how many films saw fit to jump back and forth through a famous person's life, I'd come up with at least a dozen examples from films I watched this year. Enough of this crap already, just start at the beginning and end at the end, and if that doesn't make your story interesting, then PICK ANOTHER STORY TO TELL.
There are also visions of what COULD have happened, mostly from Sully's point of view, and mostly concerning Sully's plane crashing into one of NYC's many occupied buildings. But we all know this DIDN'T HAPPEN, so this kind of comes off like a desperate attempt to spice up the story with what, a peek into some alternate realities? Can we say for sure that Sully had these visions, that he was tormented with nightmares of the crashes that didn't happen? I'm not sold on this point - I'd bet my money that the filmmakers didn't think that the landing that did happen wasn't nearly as visually arresting as the crashes that didn't, so they used CGI to give us a peak at those - but I'm calling shenanigans on this.
And I've said this before, whenever there's a film about an airplane crashing - I don't care if it's "Airport" or "Alive" or "Flight" or "Cast Away" - they all reinforce the fact that air travel is still dangerous to some degree. I wish designers could guarantee every plane's safety, but they can't - so I don't recommend frequent air travel until such time as it becomes safe in a foolproof way. If a flock of birds can bring down an airplane, maybe that should be telling us something. Or maybe movies should focus more on air travel as the miracle that it is (like, how DOES the plane stay up in the air? I took physics class in high-school and I still have no clue. I think the plane just goes fast enough that it keeps going straight, and the earth curves out from under it, right?) and maybe a little less on the planes that crash.
Also, can we get a movie to explain to me how time zones work? This always makes my head hurt - like, if you could travel across a time zone, west to east, in a fast plane and do it in under an hour, aren't you going back in time? Like if I had a plane that left New York at 5 pm and could get to L.A. in an hour, I'd arrive at 6 pm NYC time, but that would be only 3 pm L.A. time, so I'd somehow arrive before I left. Wait, that can't be right...
Also starring Aaron Eckhart (last seen in "London Has Fallen"), Laura Linney (last seen in "Man of the Year"), Mike O'Malley (last seen in "28 Days"), Jamey Sheridan (last seen in "Spotlight"), Anna Gunn, Holt McCallany (last seen in "Justice League"), Valeria Mahaffey (last seen in "Seabiscuit"), Delphi Harrington, Ann Cusack (last seen in "Nightcrawler"), Molly Hagan (last seen in "Red State"), Jane Gabbert, Jerry Ferrara (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Autumn Reeser, Max Adler (last seen in "Café Society"), Sam Huntington, Christopher Curry (last seen in "Red Dragon"), Wayne Bastrup, Jeff Kober, Molly Bernard, Chris Bauer, Blake Jones, with cameos from Katie Couric (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), David Letterman, Michael Rapaport (last seen in "The Heat")
RATING: 5 out of 10 flight simulators
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