Movie Review

The Search for Sully's Enemy

Peter Hitchens
The Daily Mail Australia

CLINT Eastwood’s clever and engrossing film Sully, about the amazing landing of a passenger jet on the freezing Hudson River, needed a villain. Who could it be?

After all, pilot Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger behaved like the well-trained and self-disciplined gentleman he is, keeping his head and using all his years of experience to land an Airbus on water without killing anyone, after geese destroyed his plane’s engines and turned it into an enormous glider. And the passengers, instead of scrambling over each other and clawing for their possessions as the plane sank (which must have been a temptation), behaved like grown-ups and made their way sensibly to the exits.

All the rescue services did as they should have done.

Who was left to be the bad guy? The government. To put it mildly, the movie plays up the investigations which concluded that Sullenberger might possibly have made it to an actual airport runway, if he’d acted inhumanly fast.

I found all this very believable. But actually the pilot had already become such a figure of admiration that in real life he was more or less above criticism. It tells you a lot about the modern USA, and the victory of Donald Trump, that the authorities are the ones who come out of it badly.