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.
#CAPTAIN PHILLIPS MOVIE#
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. "I didn't know what to do.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. "Tom Hanks came around the corner and I froze," HM Albert said. She had auditioned for a bit part, ("I was not going to let somebody else be the doc on this ship!") and suddenly ended up opposite one of the biggest movie stars in America, which she found "very intimidating!" The scene was shot in the sick bay of a Navy destroyer. "My first take was terrible!" she laughed. The studio won't let us show it, but it features another unlikely star, Navy Hospital Corpsman Danielle Albert. What happened next is probably the most powerful scene in the movie. The Maersk Alabama's captain had been rescued. Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Bainbridge tows the lifeboat from the Maersk Alabama to the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer (right), April 13, 2009, after the successful rescue of Capt. "Most of my problems were solved once I got into that lifeboat," Phillips told Martin. Hard to believe, but Phillips considered that something of a victory. Instead, they took $30,000 from the ship's safe and headed for Somalia in a lifeboat. In both the movie and in the real thing, Captain Phillips and his crew prevented the pirates from taking over the ship. "I remember seeing Tom's expression," said Greengrass, "and I could see in it thinking, 'Oh, I've got a worthy antagonist here.' A real pirate, and a real actor." It's not something that I had in mind that I was going to say," said Abdi. "I was just being the character and that came out. You cannot believe your eyes that someone is that skinny and that scary and that fast and has that much malevolence and seriousness in their eyes."Īs Abdi - playing the pirate named Muse - approached Hanks, he ad-libbed what were virtually the first words the two actors said to each other: "Look at me. "I found them so convincing that my lower lip began to tremble a little bit and the hair was standing on the back of my neck. "It was a pretty terrifying and exciting moment all at the same time," Hanks added.
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