Tom Hanks versus the bad Africans is so Hollywood it’s almost farcical. There’s every reason to catch the advertisements for this movie and throw up your hands. Captain Phillips is actually based on two true stories: the catastrophe Phillips documented in his book A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea and Hollywood’s dehumanization of the Third World. All the men do is sit and wait and shout and talk - and as they do, the film’s moral sophistication begins to work on you. The film spends the second half alternating between the lifeboat and the American military’s attempt to find and rescue Phillips. But they take the captain with them as a hostage, and a film already thriving in close quarters only intensifies in a space 28 feet long. A series of events forces them off the ship and into the little orange boat anyway. A couple of the Somalis view that as an insult. He tells them to take the ship’s $30,000 in cash and a lifeboat and go. He keeps his walkie-talkie open so the crew can improvise based on what he’s telling the intruders. Phillips tries in vain to keep the Somalis from discovering the 20 or so men hiding far below near the engines. What occurs between them first is potboiler action stuff. Logically, the film’s two halves first meet on the ship’s bridge. When they find out their target is an American ship, the Somalis react as though they’ve won the Powerball. They want a multi-million-dollar ransom because whoever owns the ship can afford it. But they also have a kind of Robin Hood bravado. Ali).Īs a quartet, they shove off toward the Maersk ship in part because they have no choice. The task of catching and taking over one goes to four ropy men with geometrically long faces: Muse (Barkhad Abdi), Najee (Faysal Ahmed), Bilal (Barkhad Abdirahman), and Elmi (Mahat M. The men are bullied into piracy, often more than once, only to return the spoils to the local warlord. The local industry no longer appears to be very lucrative. Not long after Phillips hugs his wife (Catherine Keener) good-bye in New Hampshire, there’s a shot of commotion in a Somali fishing village. It grants the men in the boat their own side of the story. Actually, the movie does something more remarkable. He knows the men in the skiff are on his radio signal, so he fakes a military call to intimidate the blip.Īll along, we’re also in the rocketing, rickety skiff. The crew have to be prepared to defend themselves. The maritime authorities haven’t given the most useful instructions. But Phillips, who is nervous as well, exerts his authority. The camera gets in close on the crew’s worried, agitated faces. But once it’s clear the ship has been targeted, the men shed their exasperation and spring into action. The glowers that he wins are the ones you give a boss who seems to take his authority too seriously. There have been warnings of trouble near the Horn of Africa, but it’s clear that even without a threat Phillips runs a tight ship.Įarly in the movie, the captain interrupts a coffee break and sends the crew to their stations. The ship’s captain, a trim, goateed New Englander named Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks), is in the middle of conducting security drills when he notices a suspicious blip approaching on the radar. The hijacking scenes are tense and swift and grimly ironic. And, astonishingly, this movie is as much about them as it is about their victims.Ĭaptain Phillips dramatizes the story of an actual 2009 incident in which armed Somali men came aboard an enormous Maersk container ship headed for Mombasa. A world away, some other people covet what those goods signify. Once the ship is hijacked, every shot that features even a bit of all that tonnage recasts it: Lots of men and women risk their lives to make and deliver goods that some people take for granted. But the stacks also establish the stakes of the stress and emotional devastation to come. The camera hovers above stacks and stacks of big, bright, 8-by-40-foot rectangles. The doomed voyage in Paul Greengrass’s Captain Phillips begins where bad action-thrillers often climax: amid shipping containers.
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