On January 15 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport in New York, travelling to Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina. Barely minutes into the flight, the flight suffered engine loss due to a bird strike. With 155 lives in the balance, pilots Captain Chesley B. 'Sully' Sullenberger III and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles did the impossible: they performed a water landing on the Hudson River. The whole event- from bird strike to landing- took just 208 seconds, and it was done with no loss of life. This incredible true-life story has now been made into a film, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Tom Hanks as Sullenberger and Aaron Eckhart as Skiles.
I'm sure I've said several times before that I'm not a massive Tom Hanks fan. That said, he's always a safe pair of hands; you can always depend on him to put in a solid, decent performance. That is very true here: he plays Sully as a thoroughly decent and likeable man, humble, self-effacing, thrown into a media storm for doing his job and having to come to terms with that. Unsurprisingly, there are questions to be asked when something like this happens and the film is then set up almost as a courtroom drama as the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) begins its investigation. Here's where things start to skew a little; the film shows the NTSB as accusatory and prosecutorial, seeking to disprove Sully's version of events and showing him to have acted wrongly by performing the water landing and that the cause of the crash was pilot error; such a finding would have ended Sully's career.
Other performances are decent enough; Eckhart is strong as the no-nonsense Skiles, although he's not given a whole lot to do throughout. Similarly, Laura Linney feels wasted as Sully's wife Lorraine, popping up throughout to cry or to harangue Sully (or maybe that's just how I saw it; she didn't exactly feel or seem supportive until the very end). The script attempts to flesh out the stories of some of the passengers- a father-son golfing trip, a wheelchair-using woman and her daughter, a new mother- but it all feels very surface and, crucially, you don't really care about them. Well, I didn't at least.
Eastwood's direction is solid and the reconstruction of the plane crash and landing is done well. Some scenes play out like an anodyne version of the 2012 Robert Zemeckis film Flight- here, there's no suggestion of impropriety or alcohol/drug misuse- but the investigation scenes play well. It feels a little muddled which, given a relatively short runtime of 96 minutes, is a surprise.
However, the film is, at its core, a paean to 'the human factor'. It is this that Sully points out during the investigation; a computer simulation can only do so much. You need the human factor, its insight and experience, to inform decisions made- for good and bad. In a moment of crisis, humanity can pull together and help those who need it (an end-card gives praise to the coastguards, ferry crews, police and firefighters who helped rescue the passengers from the ditched plane). Given the darkness of our current times, this is a timely message.
All said, solid if unremarkable.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Tez
SPOILER WARNING! This review discusses and/or mentions a few important plot points. If you would prefer not to have these spoiled, please stop reading now and come back once you've seen the film.
American Sniper is a difficult film to talk about, mostly because it deals with an emotive subject (the war in Iraq and America's part in it) and also because it is based on a true story. Any criticism of the film feels like a criticism of the person and that isn't exactly fair on those left behind.
As much as it is possible, I am going to limit myself to talking about the film as a film- as a fictionalised account of Chris Kyle's life and work- and try and stay out of the bigger picture or wider context of the war, the military and even what Kyle was like as a real person (or what the book he wrote, which the screenplay is based on, says). This might be a bit of a cop-out but it's probably safer. For an interesting look on the historical accuracy (or otherwise) of the film, this is a good article to start with.
Kyle (Bradley Cooper) was raised by a devoutly religious family, initially becoming a cowboy and then signed up to the US Navy SEALS and acted as a sniper in Iraq, completing four tours of duty. He is credited with over 160 confirmed kills although the figure may be much higher. He married and had children and, once he left the Army, he helped injured soldiers in rehabilitation. He was shot and killed in 2013 at a shooting range in Texas by a young army veteran he was trying to help, who was suffering from PTSD.
First things first: there is a lot I didn't like about American Sniper.
Mostly, the bellicose, jingoistic, America-f*ck-yeah, hoo-rah attitude espoused by Kyle. Things were black and white: America is the greatest country in the world and anyone threatening it needs to be put down with extreme prejudice. The world operates in shades of grey, sadly, so this tunnel-visioned narrowmindedness is utterly alienating- not to mention wearying in the extreme. There's no discussion, nothing wavering from that message. They're evil, they're savages, they deserve to die. That's that. Done. I understand that some people see the world thus and that's how they operate- and no doubt for soldiers, they have to see the world in such terms in order to do the things they sometimes have to do- but, as a narrative, it's not something I can get behind.
A secondary issue is the (over)use of war movie cliches that infect the plot. A colleague talking about marriage once he gets home? Dead or injured at least. A shadowy doppelganger of the lead character, doing the same thing but on the other side? Present. That said, Eastwood has an eye for detail and does create some tense moments (such as the section of the film shown in the trailer where Kyle must decide on taking down a child armed with a missile). But after that, it does go down hill and occasionally felt like watching someone play a first-person-shooter.
Cooper's performance is decent. Kyle is a man of few words, a lot goes on behind his eyes and the subtle hints (underplayed) that he may be suffering from PTSD work well without any histrionics. Kyle appeared to be a man unrepentant about his work- claiming that he would meet his Maker with a clean conscience- and that's a difficult sell without coming across as a psychopath, but the film just about does it. The rest of Kyle's platoon are sadly unremarkable cannon-fodder and those characters are not fleshed out at all.
The best performance of the film comes from Sienna Miller who plays Kyle's wife, Taya. Her uncertainty at getting into a relationship with a SEAL is played well and she and Cooper have a real potent chemistry together. She is the emotional anchor of the film and absolutely sells it without going over the top. At times you feel like screaming at her 'why don't you just leave him?' but Miller's performance brings across the deep love that Taya has for her husband, which makes the end of the story even more devastating.
Kyle's time away from the forces and his work with rehabilitation is perhaps more interesting than a lot of the previous stuff, but it gets glossed over with a shortish 20-minute coda, with a presentation of the fateful day that Kyle was killed. The action takes place off-screen, with a succinct one-line text to sum it up. The mid-credits then show real-life footage from Kyle's memorial service and the end credits then roll in total silence to let you absorb the tragedy. It's undeniably powerful but utterly manipulative at the same time.
As a film, American Sniper is not without its issues. You either have to get behind the black-and-white view of the world its main character has, or be able to see past it, to engage. It's probably one of the stronger films that has been made about the war in Iraq but it's still not the Iraq war equivalent to, say, Platoon or Saving Private Ryan.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Tez
