Sully

In January 2009 Captain Chesley Sullenberger (otherwise known as Sully) crash landed US Airways Flight 1549 into the Hudson River after colliding with a flock of birds which knocked out both engines just thirty seconds after take-off. Incredibly the aircraft stayed afloat long enough for all 155 people on board to be rescued amidst very cold conditions.

From the moment the plane lost power there were only 208 seconds before it crashed. That’s not a lot of time to work with if you want to make a film. So director Clint Eastwood mainly focusses on the aftermath as Sully (Tom Hanks) deals with the resulting media attention and then, along with his co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), faces goes the National Transportation Safety Board who are investigating the incident. Although Eastwood also struggles to make a story out of that.

Oddly the investigation seems to take place immediately after the incident and we don’t even see Sully go home to his wife, Lorraine (Laura Linney), who we never actually see without a telephone attached to her ear. Neither she nor Sully seem very fazed by the fact he’d just been involved in a place crash.

The flight was bound from New York's LaGuardia Airport for Charlotte and the investigation asks whether the plane could have made it back to LaGuardia or to nearby Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. Flight simulations allege that the plane could have successfully landed at both LaGuardia and Teterboro.

Sully however disputes this and argues that the ‘human element’ needs to be taken into consideration. This causes an immediate sea change in the investigation as if they’d never thought of something so bleedingly obvious. 35 seconds human reaction time is then allocated, the simulations are rerun, the planes crash and now Sully can officially be declared a hero. I’m sure it didn’t quite happen like that.

There is nothing particularly wrong with the film except that there isn't really a story here to tell. I’m also sure the NTSB’s investigation was more to ascertain the cause of the accident and to ensure it wouldn’t happen again rather than the total witch hunt against Sully as is portrayed here.

The crash landing into the Hudson was the story but they seemed to go out of their way not to make a disaster movie which is fair enough, we have had more than enough of them. Instead the story is so flimsy that the film wraps up in 90 minutes and that’s after they have needlessly shown the whole crash landing sequence twice.

I didn't know that much about this story beforehand so I went in hoping for more insight but didn’t learnt much. However there are some nice shots of the real Chesley Sullenberger at the end as they show film of the flight's reunion.

Bridge Of Spies

Bridge Of Spies is a historical drama 'inspired by true events' which tells the story of a spy swap during the Cold War. It sees Steven Spielberg in collaboration with the Coen Brothers in collaboration with Walt Disney. Quite a combination.

In Brooklyn in 1957, Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) is arrested under the suspicion of being a Soviet spy. James Donovan (Tom Hanks) is a mere insurance lawyer who is asked to defend Abel in order to show the world that the American justice system is just and fair, even though the public have already convicted him.

Donovan may be defending the most hated man in America but he wants to do right thing, legally, by his client. That isn’t easy when even the judge has already reached his decision.

When Abel is convicted Donovan has the foresight to persuade the judge not to send him to his death. He foresees a time when having a Soviet spy in your jails could be useful.

Donovan is vindicated when an American U-2 spy plane is shot down over Soviet territory and the pilot, Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), fails to destroy both the plane and himself, as ordered. The Soviets capture Powers, convict him as a spy, and send him to prison.

When the Soviets get in touch with Donovan, he is sent out to East Berlin to negotiate a prisoner exchange. This he has to do as a private citizen rather than an American official. Any deal is further complicated by Donovan’s wish to also release another US prisoner, a student called Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers).  

Overall it is pretty good film if you can cope with the large dose of American patriotism that it comes served with. Patriotism that attempts to paint the East Germans as clowns which I'm sure they weren't. There’s also the totally over the top (and unnecessarily so) crash scene of the U-2. This is the only nod to your typical Hollywood action movie which this thankfully isn’t. The rest of the two hours is mercifully free of any other such gimmicks.

The film seems to be largely historically accurate and the cinematography is fabulous with some great scenes of cold war Berlin such as the construction of the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie etc.

Tom Hanks is solid as Donovan but it is Mark Rylance who shines out as the star of the film. His understated performance as Rudolf Abel is pure class.

‘Bridge of Spies’ shows that the power of a good story can still stand up on its own even in modern day Hollywood.

Captain Phillips

'Captain Phillips' is Hollywood’s retelling of the hijack of the container ship MV Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates in 2009. Tom Hanks plays the man himself Captain Phillips.

The Alabama was heading toward the horn of Africa with a full load when it was attacked by two skiffs of armed Somalis. The ship basically puts the hammer down, creating such a wake that the skiffs give up but the next day they are back.

This time they have a better boat and better tactics, they get alongside and board the Alabama. The Somali pirate leader Muse (Barkhad Abdi) and his four henchmen head to the bridge, going through some pretty ineffective locked gates. Once on the bridge they hold Phillips and a few other crew members hostage at gun point. Meanwhile the rest of the crew are below deck hiding.

The crew manage to confuse the hijackers by shutting the power down and one of hijackers cuts his foot in the darkness on some broken glass that has deliberately been left out. Phillips then convinces them to cut their losses, take the money that is in the safe, and leave in the lifeboat. Unfortunately they decide to take Phillips with them. In pursuit though is not only the Albama itself but also the US Navy who have no intention of letting the Somalis get back to shore.

It’s a decent film but for me the whole thing falls down the minute they get into the lifeboat. There is great tension to the film at first, when the pirates are approaching the ship, when they board it and when they’re on it searching for the crew. All this time there is a sense of being trapped in the middle of nowhere with no cavalry about to come over the horizon and we know not who of his crew are going to live or die.

Unfortunately once Phillips is on the lifeboat and isolated from his crew, its story over because we know he lives and for me at least the tension just going down the pan. In fact the last hour or so spent on the lifeboat just seems to goes on and on and crawls to the expected conclusion where a rescued Phillips ends up in the care of the most unsympathetic nurse you've ever seen. I suppose Hollywood often changes endings but I just didn’t see them changing a survival to a death, unfortunately.

The best thing here is the battle of wits and wills between Phillips and Muse, and it is interesting to hear the pirates take on things but it’s not enough. The film needed another angle which it just didn't have. Like a distraught family at home, desperate for news of him, to give the film a much needed emotional angle but it wasn’t there. It all felt a bit hollow in the end and at least 30 minutes too long.

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas is based on David Mitchell's 2004 novel and must have been a huge challenge for the filmmakers to adapt. The book has six radically different stories from six different time periods but unlike the book, the film intertwines these. This I thought would make it impossible to follow, particularly for someone like me who prefers a linear plot, but no, it is done well and works brilliantly. I have little trouble keeping track of who's who, what's what, where’s when etc, as the film cuts seamlessly from one century to another, often cleverly dropping us in a similar situation when we arrive there. 

As for the plot, well there’s a lot of it and it would be bordering on the insane to attempt to summarise it but here goes...  

 

We start on board a ship in the 19^th century with a man called Adam Ewing and a runaway slave. Then we’re off to 1930’s Britain and a bisexual English composer called Frobisher who is reading Adam Ewing diary.

 

Then its 1970’s San Francisco where an investigative journalist called Luisa Rey meets Frobisher’s gay lover forty years on and also reads Frobisher’s letters to him.  

In present day Britain, a publisher called Cavendish receives a manuscript of a novel based on Rey's life while he is in hiding, against his will in a nursing home, from the associates of a gangster whose book he has published.

 

He is inspired to write a screenplay of his own story, the film of which is then watched by Sonmi, a genetically engineered fabricant in 2144 Seoul, while she is on the run. 

 

She is executed and becomes the goddess than the tribesmen worship years later, 106 winters after ‘The Fall’, where pretty much everything has fallen apart and humanity has ended up back where it started, living in mud huts and caves.

So its part science fiction, part historical drama, part romance, part comedy, part thriller and fully one big audacious idea.

There are many themes going on. Oppression, freedom, destiny, the gradual increasing dominance of the establishment over everything, the idea that our actions affect others throughout time and perhaps reincarnation. What fits in nicely with this reincarnation concept is the fact that all the principal actors play different characters in each story.

So Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Xun Zhou, Susan Sarandon, Keith David, James D'Arcy and Doona Bae appear many times. If you can spot them and often you can’t because they may have been aged, or had their race changed or even they may have changed their gender.

In the end credits, each actor's name appears with a clip of each of their roles. Everyone stopped to watch this, and some roles were so well disguised that there were gasps of amazement as the audience discovered who played whom.

Cloud Atlas will entertain you as much as it will infuriate you but that is no bad thing. Really though there's simply so much to debate about it, that you should just go see the film. Don't try to understand it, just enjoy it. I actually thought I was going to hate it going in but I was sorry when it finished.

You also would have thought this mad cap idea would have been a shoo-in for several Oscar nominations, Screenplay certainly, Editing, Makeup etc, if not for the acting roles which are good but not spectacular. Still, if Daniel Day Lewis can win for one good acting role, what award do you give the actors here, several of which put in six. Sadly, not a single nomination.