Director Paul Greengrass’ portrayal here of a noble white officer suffering at the hands of insidious black pirates smacks of Rudyard Kipling. Captain Phillip might as well be so named.
The best documentary dramas take stories we are familiar with and show layers beyond the obvious. While you may remember the news story a few years ago, where Navy SEALs snipers took out three Somali pirates who were holding an American boat captain hostage, screenwriter Billy Ray (Shattered Glass, The Hunger Games) and director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy) put us right in the thick of that action in Captain Phillips.
Based on Richard Phillips and Stephen Talty’s memoir, ‘A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs and Dangerous Days at Sea,’ this movie sought to evoke the terror of Phillips’ captivity with the kind of immersive storytelling that Greengrass has come to be known.
But while the filmmaker captured his hero’s humanity through words and action, he failed to paint as vivid a portrait of his villains, their humanity and why they have come to be so ruthless. That mistake left a bad taste in my mouth after 2 hours of sheer depraved hatred for these Somalis and the narrow mindedness so symptomatic of such an American folklore.
Perhaps this is the reason this movie is perched at a face-saving IMDB rating of 6.2. It will suffice to pull it down a tad. A 4.6 rating will truly capture the lack of multi-dimensionality these Somali villains have suffered in this film.
Those Somali pirates were bad, they had no right to kidnap Captain Phillip! Yes, Somalia is a tragedy unfolding in Africa where people fight out their convictions on the battle ground for what their country should become. But even Adolf Hitler has been portrayed in a more humanistic light than these Somali pirates. And that my friends, may be tantamount to blasphemy. Downfall, 2004, by director Oliver Hirschbiegel is a supreme example.
Captain Phillip may appeal to some. I think it should have appealed to us all had the script been a little thoughtful. Somalis are not all pirates, they are not all machine gun toting idiots who wish they lived in America! They too desire a country just like ours, to live in, marry in, celebrate each other in and hope for! This thoughtless way of portraying others, especially Africa and Black people, at some point needs to just stop!
Still, it’s a fine showcase for Hanks, who captures the captain’s quiet authority in calm seas, his fortitude under duress and his overwhelming shock when the ordeal ends. It’s too bad his most extended bit of dialogue is a horribly written exchange with the missus (played by Catherine Keener in a terrible wig), in which they speak in the broadest terms about the world today and things sure are rough and all. His performance picks up substantially once he leaves the suburbs and assumes command of the bridge.
Captain Phillips will no doubt draw comparisons to Zero Dark Thirty for its ripped-from-the-headlines storytelling, but this is a case in which the writer and director are as interested in the human element as they are in the true events they’re recounting. It’s too bad that they couldn’t have made their real-life bad guys as multi-dimensional as their hero.
The story in and of itself is a gripping one: In the spring of 2009, Phillips (played here with unfussy humanity by Tom Hanks) was shepherding the cargo ship Maersk Alabama around the horn of Africa when it was set upon by Somali pirates. The captain and his crew managed to elude the raiders on their first pass, but the following day, the marauders boarded the ship.
Unable to access the ship’s cargo and fought to a standstill by the crew, the pirates instead took Phillips hostage, intending to transport him to Somalia to be ransomed by the insurance company. After several days in a lifeboat — an enclosed vessel, not like the ones you’ve seen in Life of Pi or Hitchcock’s Lifeboat — Phillips was eventually rescued by the Navy.
Director: Paul Greengrass
Writers: Billy Ray (screenplay), Richard Phillips (based on the book “A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea”)
Stars: Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi, Barkhad Abdirahman
Especially in when patriots allow their America to shutdown – American exceptionalism!
This movie was just plain bad and cheesy. I can’t blame you for hating on it.
I think it deserves the 6.2 rating on imdb. It’s like that grade, that B, that Billonaire daughters get in ivy league schools – it’s just another way to give a fail grade to persons whose parents are cantankerous enough to knock on your door all day! Better to avoid the trouble.
Well that’s how it supposed to be – Big Black Monsters and Tiny White Angels! Hmmm! Please gimme some more.
All things we have learned comes around. Yesterday it was Nazi exceptionalism, today it’s American exceptionalism, at least in film, tomorrow it’s somebody else’s turn. The folly of life itself!! These Somali pirates and our American forces fight for the same thing – a place on Earth. Detestable – what civilization.
Another American eye-candy. These kind of movies continue to pile on. Blood Diamond, Last King of Scotland etc. Men, we’ve had it and we don’t care anymore. Let ’em do how they feel.
Yet another of those Hollywood pictures. I am disappointed with Paul Greengrass. I didn’t know he had this in him.