Sully opened in US theaters ten years ago this week, on 9 September 2016, revisiting the January day when Captain Chesley Sullenberger glided a crippled Airbus onto the Hudson River and saved all 155 people aboard. Clint Eastwood's film is not really about the water landing itself, which it treats briskly. It is about what happened to Sullenberger's reputation in the weeks after.
Eastwood cast Tom Hanks as Sullenberger and Aaron Eckhart as his co-pilot Jeff Skiles, adapting Sullenberger's own memoir Highest Duty. By 2016, Eastwood was deep into a run of true-story dramas built around ordinary competence under pressure, and Sully, which holds 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, fits that pattern more than it fits the disaster-movie mold its marketing leaned on.
The film's real tension comes from a National Transportation Safety Board investigation that Eastwood dramatizes as openly adversarial, with investigators all but accusing Sullenberger of endangering his passengers by choosing the river over a return to the airport. The actual NTSB has pushed back hard on that portrayal, noting it was never consulted during production and that its inquiry was a standard safety review rather than the hostile interrogation the film stages. Even a film this grounded in fact takes real dramatic liberties to build its case.
The landing sequences hold up regardless, restaged with the same restraint Eastwood brings to most of his work, and Hanks plays Sullenberger's discomfort with sudden fame as convincingly as he plays the landing itself. Ten years on, Sully stands as one of the more clear-eyed dramatizations of a real event from the last decade, precisely because it is honest about how little of the story was the crash.
