Category: Disaster film

Sully: Miracle on the Hudson (2016)


Tom Hanks braces for impact as heroically normal hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger

Director: Clint Eastwood

Cast: Tom Hanks (Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger), Aaron Eckhart (Jeff Skiles), Laura Linney (Lorraine Sullenberger), Anna Gunn (Dr Elizabeth Davis), Autumn Reeser (Tess Soza), Ann Cusack (Donna Dent), Holt McCallany (Mike Cleary), Mike O’Malley (Charles Porter), Jamey Sheridan (Ben Edwards)

On January 15th 2009, a miracle happened in New York. A plane struck birds, causing double engine failure. Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, left with no options, decided to land the plane on the Hudson River. Amazingly, all 155 passengers and crew survived unharmed.

Eastwood’s emotional, skilfully made film brilliantly recreates this true-life event, with Hanks taking on the lead as Sully. The framing device Eastwood uses is the National Transportation Safety Board investigation into the crash, here re-imagined as an almost persecution, convinced that pilot error and failure to react quickly enough were the causes.

What’s most striking for me is this film’s tribute to the professionalism and heroism of everyone involved. Just as Sully states during his hearing, this was a team effort, not the work of a lone hero. This comes across strongly here. Air hostess is a profession which, god knows, it’s easy to mock: but this film shows their unflappable bravery, calmness and leadership. Similarly, the first responders are dedicated and compassionate. I’m not ashamed to say I felt myself choke up at one point, when a first responder tell one waterlogged passenger “no one dies today”. The film ends with a tribute to New York coming together to save lives – and it’s a message ringing through the film.

Eastwood knows the drama of the film is directly linked to the crash, so weaves this event throughout the film, returning to it at least four times from different angles. He opens the film with Sully’s nightmare of what could have happened if he had flown towards an airport (the plane ploughing into New York) – a grim reminder of what could have been, which hangs over the rest of the runtime. The evacuation of the downed plane is gripping, and is filmed with a restraint that lets the events speak for themselves. The emotional force throughout these sequences is compelling.

Tom Hanks is perfectly cast as the low-key everyday hero achieving the impossible with only quiet courage and years of experience behind him. To be honest, it’s a role Hanks could probably play standing on his head, but his quiet everyman quality is essential to the film’s success. He’s well supported by Eckhart and other members of the cast.

It’s good Hanks is so assured, as he is required to anchor much of the film’s plot. The plot is where the film struggles as, to put it simply, the story away from the crash isn’t actually that dramatic or interesting. An attempt has been made to make the investigation into the crash into a sort of inquisition into Sully’s actions, but it never really rings true (it largely wasn’t) and it’s never really interesting enough, certainly not when compared to the crash itself.

In fact, it’s hard not to think that there is some sort of message being built into the film here, contrasting the low-key individual Sully with the faceless, procedural suits who can’t imagine the importance of the human element. Maybe that’s reading a bit much into it, but either way it’s average drama: there is never any doubt in the viewer’s mind that Sully will be completely exonerated. It’s an attempt to add dramatic tension to a story everyone already knows.

Furthermore, Sully is too “normal” a man to sustain a drama around his life: in another film inspired by these events, Flight, Denzel Washington played a drunken pilot who saved an aeroplane in a moment of inspired flying. The drama of that film was based on the film’s exploration of Washington’s character’s lack of responsibility vs. his act of heroism. Sully doesn’t have this, so we don’t get that sense of conflict within the character or with others. Put simply, Sully is such a regular decent, guy that, outside these unique circumstances, he is not really a dramatically interesting character – and the film can’t create a plot that brings drama out of his situation.

So Sully is a mixed bag of a film. Hanks gives his best as ever, but the film can’t really get over the fact that it’s recreating a moment in history, and fails to give that moment an effective dramatic framework. There is some good supporting work, although many of the other roles are thankless (Laura Linney’s role in particular is literally phoned in), but the film only flies when the plane doesn’t. The reconstruction of the event, and the people who were involved in it, is inspiring and stirring – but the rest of the film is little more than a humdrum courtroom drama.

I Am Legend (2007)


Rush hour is a lot easier to beat when its just you and your dog.

Director: Francis Lawrence

Cast: Will Smith (Robert Neville), Alice Braga (Anna Montez), Charlie Tahan (Ethan), Salli Richardson (Zoe Neville), Willow Smith (Marley Neville), Emma Thompson (Dr. Alice Krippin)

If you’re going to make a movie that involves the viewer watching one person, alone with just a dog, for well over an hour, you’d better be sure that the person you recruit to play that role can actually hold the viewer’s interest for that time. Factor in, for Hollywood, that the person you pick needs to be capable of getting big box-office, and you ain’t got a lot of choices. But casting Will Smith in this was a choice the studio largely got right.

The year is 2012 and the world has ended. Robert Neville (Will Smith) is a military virologist, the last surviving human in New York. A miracle cure for cancer went disastrously wrong three years before and killed 94% of the world’s population, mutated 5% into feral “darkseekers” who attack anything living at night, leaving just 1% of the world’s population immune. Neville lives alone in New York, with only his deceased daughter’s dog for company, and works to find a cure for the disease by capturing and experimenting on the darkseekers.

In a remarkably brave and unusual move for a blockbuster, Will Smith is essentially alone on screen for a solid hour. The film takes a measured, well-paced delight in following his daily routines, covering everything from his work in immunology to scavenging for supplies, hunting deer (escaped from the zoo), hitting golf balls off aircraft carriers, and having free run of a video store he has filled with mannequins. His Washington Square house is heavily fortified, but also remarkably homely and certainly not that bad a place to watch the end of the world from.

Following this daily routine is, by far and away, the most interesting part of the film, as it is one of the few parts that actually feels unique and original. In fact, you wish it could go on longer and that the film didn’t need to revert back its more predictable “one man against the monsters” theme. The ingenuity of survival in extreme circumstances, and the eerie freedom of the busiest city in the world completely empty, makes you wonder not only “could I do that” but also, secretly “would it be fun for a while to drive a fast car around Times Square or whack golf balls off the wing of a stealth bomber?”.

“For a while” is the key thing here, as the film also explores the deeply damaging effect extreme isolation has had on Neville’s psychology. It’s here that Smith earns his chops. He’s an extremely engaging actor, so you’re happy to spend time with him, but he’s also skilled enough to play a cracked psyche without going overboard. Neville chats (and flirts) with mannequins, knows Shrek so well he can speak in perfect unison (inflections and all) with the film, and keeps up a regular stream of conversation with his dog Sam, including asking her what she is planning to do for his birthday. Much of this is played lightly, but at key moments Smith allows Neville to snap. He also plays the tragedy gently – his reactions to Sam’s death are genuinely quite moving because they are quiet and restrained.

This is all interesting stuff. Less interesting are the “darkseekers” and the film’s final resolution. Firstly, the darkseekers themselves are bog-standard zombie monsters – screaming, running, deadly creatures with their one quirk being their fear of UV light. Other than that, it’s nothing you haven’t seen in half a dozen movies before (better). Turning them into zombie creatures does make Neville even more isolated but makes encounters with them fairly predictable, mostly inspired by films past. Most of the film’s big confrontation set pieces have a slightly tired familiar feeling to them. I’m already struggling to remember them, and I only saw the film two days ago.

The major problem with this film is its ending. I Am Legend had its ending re-shot after test audiences saw it. Originally, a reveal would have been that the darkseekers were far more intelligent than appeared, and their motivation was to prevent Neville’s experimentation on them. Two scenes still make a point of discussing Neville’s Mengele-like wall of photos of dead darkseekers, killed by his cure experiments, and other hints remain through the film: the traps they set , the presence of an “Alpha” leader among the monsters, repeated shots of the tattoo on Neville’s last captured darkseeker, which was intended to be a crucial clue that she was the mate of the Alpha.

But test audiences weren’t having that. So in the final version, all this build-up and suggestion is shoved aside as Neville grabs a grenade and blows himself and them to hell to allow a cure to be taken to the rest of mankind. As the cure is taken to an idyllic community in the country (church and all) mankind’s future is his “legend” or some such guff. It’s a major loss of nerve that makes the film just another run-of-the-mill monster flick. It doesn’t match with hints that remain in the whole film and it doesn’t tie in with the more successful first hour of the film. It doesn’t question the possible rights and wrongs of Neville’s actions (at best comprehensive animal experimentation), but fully endorses them.

It’s a shame as this has ideas, its vistas of New York being reclaimed by nature are interesting and memorable, and Will Smith is pretty good in a straight acting role. But instead it settles for being a schlocky monster pic, where we can unquestioningly cheer as everything is neatly tied up with a bow and everything we thought about all of its characters is confirmed. As such, this film isn’t a classic and it hasn’t had the sort of life it might have been able to have. Despite good moments, it’s definitely not a Legend.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Our heroes undergo one hell of a cold snap

Director: Roland Emmerich
Cast: Dennis Quaid (Jack Hall), Jake Gyllenhaal (Sam Hall), Ian Holm (Professor Terry Rapson), Emmy Rossum (Laura Chapman), Sela Ward (Dr. Lucy Hall), Christopher Britton (Vorsteen), Arjay Smith (Brian Parks), Dash Mihok (Jason Evans), Jay O Sanders (Frank Harris), Adrian Lester (Simon), Kenneth Welsh (Vice President Raymond Becker)

I have to confess there are certain genres I have a weakness for. One of these is the big-budget disaster movie. For some reason, nothing helps me relax or unwind more of an evening than watching some of the great landmarks of the world being destroyed or seeing hundreds of people fleeing before a tsunami/pyroclastic flow/asteroid impact/tornado etc. There is clearly something wrong with me.

The Day After Tomorrowfits very comfortably into this trope, offering up some totally predictable and entertaining-enough thrills combined with total ‘scientific’ nonsense. Thanks to man’s foolishness, the climate of the Northern hemisphere is changing, and only Professor Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) knows that it’s happening (although to be fair he does say it will take place across hundreds of years). But gosh darn it doncha know, suddenly those projections are revised to “the next six to eight weeks!” Cue cold snaps of -100°F dealing out death in Scotland, brick sized hail bashing in heads in Tokyo, and a tsunami taking out New York. Of course Hall’s son (a game Jack Gyllenhaal) is trapped in New York so Hall mounts a rescue mission…

The world-destroying scenes are suitably high scale and dramatic, with Roland Emmerich showing his usual efficient martialling of special effects. Emmerich doesn’t get quite the credit he deserves – as a B movie hack director, he’s very good at keeping the viewer fully aware of what’s happening all the time and to whom, and very rarely labours any particularly point. He also has a goofiness about him, when directing this sort of nonsense, that encourages you to disengage critical faculties and join him for the ride. Don’t get me wrong, he’s no Hitchcock – but compared to Michael Bay, he’s David Lean.

The story doles out the expected personal dramas amongst the chaos. Its main issue is that “weather” doesn’t make the most relatable nemesis ever committed to screen. To cover this, some timber wolves are introduced into New York to terrorise Gyllenhaal and his trapped student friends (Emmerich, bless him, carefully stages a scene earlier where befuddled zookeepers stare aghast at an empty wolf pen and comment “The wolves are gone!”). To be honest, though, these animals are a bit dull – what people will really remember are the desperate dashes to get somewhere warm while another “death-on-contact” cold snap speeds towards our heroes. As most of this stuff happens in the first half of the movie, the second half can rather drag – with the Northern hemisphere effectively destroyed early doors, what else is there left to show?

Emmerich does have some fun with politics. One of the joys of the disaster film (I find) is the inevitable crowd of characters who denounce any chance of the disaster occurring. Emmerich goes one better here by having the President and Vice-President vocally and visually imitate then-office-holders Bush and Cheney. The facsimile Bush even defers to his facsimile Cheney. It makes for some heavy-handed digs at their Presidency’s lack of impetus on climate change, and general perceived weakness, but hey at least the film is using blockbusting to make some tongue-in-cheek political points.

The characters are all pulled from the stock. Quaid does his usual decent job as the guy you hire for this sort of film when your first choices are unavailable, but he never lets you down and brings a lot of dignity to the ludicrous concept. Gyllenhaal and Rossum are rather sweet as smart teenagers (gotta like a film where all the young characters are bookish nerds). Smith gives some good comic support. Ian Holm and Adrian Lester manage to keep a straight face and provide a lot of dignity to roles that must have been little more than picking up paycheques.

Disengage brain, settle back and enjoy the carnage. Emmerich is like an eager-to-please student proudly presenting his work on parents’ day. The great thing about him is that you know he is a booky, geeky type (like his heroes here) and he’ll never do anything to offend you.