It plays like a moral counterweight to news reports like this one, which celebrated the SEALs' marksmanship as a feat of athleticism - which, let's not kid ourselves, it was. When the eroding hostage negotiation is suddenly resolved by three snipers' bullets in three pirates' heads, Greengrass presents it as a moment of horror, not of triumph. Few that get taken have the benefit of such a response, a fact the film seems to acknowledge with a single line, conveyed via radio from an Admiral whose face we never see. will accept to send the message that if you mess with one 55-year-old Merchant Marine seaman from Vermont, you mess with us all? Or, more likely, that disruption of the shipping lanes will not be tolerated? This incident was the first (briefly) successful hijacking of an American ship in 200 years. Still, it must be expensive to film a parachuting sequence, and this one is brief and unspectacular - so why is it in the movie? Is Greengrass trying to underline the vast expense the U.S. The SEALs' arrival by parachute is as it happened in real life. It's a weird problem for a guy whose name literally means "peak capacity fancy cocktails" to have.) (The SEAL team leader is played by Max Martini, whose freakishly right-angular jaw has damned him to be cast only as soldiers or cops. We see the SEALs board their plane in Virginia to fly halfway around the world and skydive into the Indian Ocean, where three naval warships have converged to block the pirates from escaping to Somalia with Phillips as their hostage. Interchangeable Naval personnel give and receive orders via radio. That lower left-hand corner of the screen keeps flashing datelines. Unlike the concurrent Gravity, which brilliantly sustains tension by never cutting away from its protagonist, Captain Phillips lets us in on the turning of wheels to which neither Phillips nor his opponent/captor, the pirate leader Abdulwali Abdukhad Muse (Barkhad Abdi, giving a performance at least as persuasive as Hanks'), are privy. Maybe those tears Jessica Chastain shed in the last shot of Zero Dark Thirty were for our national soul (I doubt it), but I don't think this pair of scenes, wherein Phillips is too drained to speak, walk unassisted or do anything other than howl and weep is intended as a metaphor for anything. It takes an extra few minutes, after the Navy has rescued Phillips from his captors, to show us see how exhausted, frightened, and sickened he is by the ordeal - and no one is likely to mistake that response for ingratitude. And while Captain Phillips tells a far simpler story, covering days rather than years, both films strike me as Rorschach blots onto which anyone can project individual beliefs about how and when America swings its big stick.Įxcept - and I'll label this paragraph as a spoiler, mostly because Dana Stevens considered it as such in her Slate review - Captain Phillips doesn't quite end with the SEALs grimly/awesomely taking care of business. Like last year's Zero Dark Thirty, Greengrass' new movie is Based On A True Story and climaxes with a successful operation by Navy SEALs, those precision instruments that we rightly revere. What's empirical is that the film spends more screen time on the hapless, teenage pirates than on any of its other characters, save for Richard Phillips himself - played by America's everydad, Tom Hanks, whose next role will be that of Walt Disney. Unless, of course, it's a Dog Day Afternoon-style chronicle of the final days of a few sympathetically inept criminals who want money, not blood, but who end up dead anyway. All civilian shipping can do is wait for the next assault.Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdirahman share close quarters in Captain Phillips.Ĭaptain Phillips, Paul Greengrass' tense movie about the April 2009 hijacking of the freighter Maersk Alabama by four Somali pirates, is a love song to the patience-through-overwhelming-fire-superiority of the U.S. Globalisation and poverty are incubating these attacks. America fights back, but against a new enemy. This is a quasi-war movie set in peacetime: in some ways, a post-9/11 film, perhaps specifically a salve to the memory of USS Cole in 2000. In the 21st century it is different, and when Muse finds that gigantic, ill-defended craft it is like Ishmael seeing the whale. In centuries gone by, piracy or privateering was the prerogative of rich nations seeking warlike advantage as sea-trading routes opened up. One is weighed down with possessions, the other has none. The contrast is plain: on one side the huge, lumbering ship on the other, the fast, manoeuvrable little skiff. Two green dots coming towards Phillips's big, placid ship far too quickly. Just as in United 93, the heart-sinking premonition of danger comes with a radar-bleep.
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