“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. It's safe to say those moments will be what's remembered most from this movie, and for a long time.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: All four Somali actors are excellent, but especially Barkhad Abdi, memorable as Muse.Īs for Hanks, his final moments are his best, as Phillips registers in an intensely personal way the cumulative effects of what he's endured. Tom hanks im the captain now movie#The movie humanizes the pirates but is not inclined to forgive them. With the US Navy bearing down, it's pretty clear where it's all headed. Things get even more intense in the lifeboat, where the pirates are locked in with Phillips for several agonizing days. Good for dramatic effect - but bad if you're susceptible to queasiness or nausea at such times. On the other hand, this is where the camerawork gets ever more unstable and jittery. Greengrass and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd are at their most effective in scenes like the frightening search - in tense, dark spaces, in extreme closeup - by increasingly angry pirates hunting down the crew. "I'm the captain now," says their leader, Muse.Īnd the ordeal begins. Soon, four pirates have hoisted a ladder onto the ship. But the Maersk Alabama has no gun power aboard, only huge hoses to repel pirates and their machine guns. What WE can't believe is how a huge cargo ship is so vulnerable to small bands of armed men. This is where Hanks digs deepest as an actor. In some cases, this can detract from the sense of veracity of a truth-based film. Tom Hanks, though, delivers some of his finest work here, playing the Everyman role he does so well, in this case a fairly ordinary guy forced by circumstance to be a hero.Īnd yet "Captain Phillips" is a remarkably unsentimental film, with an emotional catharsis coming only at the very end, when we're all ready for some kind of release. More cinematically speaking, the difference is that "Captain Phillips" is a star vehicle. Three of the overmatched attackers were killed the fourth is in a U.S. So it's no surprise that Greengrass has produced another expertly crafted, documentary-style film based on a real event - the 2009 hijacking of a cargo ship by Somali pirates and the five-day standoff that ensued, with the ship's American captain, Richard Phillips, held captive in a stifling covered lifeboat after offering himself as a hostage.Ī major difference is that this movie has a happy ending - for the captain, anyway, who was rescued in a dramatic high-seas Navy sniper operation. In fact, you may not have recovered yet from the experience. If you saw Paul Greengrass's "United 93," a terrifying depiction of one of the doomed flights on 9/11, you know this director can evoke a harrowing, real-life event like few others.
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