By casting the remarkable events of that day into a framework of miracles and "somebody up there looking out for them," we cheapened and minimized the split-second thinking and considerable talents of Captain Sullenberger. "I think, in many ways, as it turned out, my entire life had been a preparation to handle that particular moment," he told Katie Couric on 60 Minutes a month later. Indeed, Sullenberger had 30 years on the job, had been an Air Force fighter pilot, and had trained flight crews in how to respond to emergencies in the air. The passengers and crew of Flight 1548 survived that flight because Sullenberger was their pilot, not because God was his co-pilot.

Yet the hand of God (well, his disciples, anyway) is all over Flight. When Whip brings in his plane for its open-field landing, the wing crashes into the steeple of a nearby church, whose members are performing baptisms in a nearby pond, wouldn't you know it, at that very instant. (It's a laughably unsubtle moment in a movie filled with them.) Shortly before the flight, the chief flight attendant is giving Whip the business for not going to church; as he lays in the hospital recovering, his pilot's union rep (Bruce Greenwood) tells him, "the way you landed that plane was nothing short of a miracle." While in the hospital, Whip shares a secret smoke with a cancer patient, who delivers a faith-floating monologue, assigning the randomness of the universe—everything from his cancer to his impending death to his meeting the pilot at that moment—to the Big Guy Upstairs. The co-pilot's wife, we're told, has informed the press, "God landed that plane."

This isn't the first time Zemeckis has used fuzzy notions of religion to muddy up his storytelling. In his 1996 film Contact, Matthew McConaughey appeared as a hunky theologian, pitching vague spirituality to decidedly secular Jodie Foster and her God-pshawing scientist brethren. Some things just can't be explained, the film assured us. In Flight, the deck is stacked even higher. Whip is a functioning alcoholic and occasional addict, which serves two purposes: 1) to allow Zemeckis to trot out yet one more tale of spiraling addiction and inspiring recovery in the Clean and Sober/28 Days/Smashed mold, and 2) to make his actions in the cockpit that much more, well, miraculous. When he walks onto that jet, he's—spoiler alert—coked to the gills, having given himself a wake-up bump after a night of boozing and sex. To feel a little less pain, he empties three beverage-cart bottles of vodka into his morning orange juice. He's drunk and high when he's at the controls, and if, as he's told, 10 other pilots in simulators couldn't replicate his landing without killing everyone on board, what does that leave us with?

To be fair, Flight acknowledges that Whip is a talented pilot, and that his act may have just been his talent working through—perhaps even being focused by—the substances in his body. "It was more like instinct," he says. But "instinct" also implies that he turned himself over to something: maybe his reflexes, or maybe even a higher power. And if that's not the case, why is all this religious stuff in the picture?