Another First Rate Performance From Tom Hanks

Rating: 8/10 (3 February 2014)

Once this gets going, it keeps you glued to your seat. "Captain Phillips" is based on the story of the Mearsk Alabama, which really was captured by pirates off the coast of Somalia in 2009. As the title suggests, the movie (based actually on a book written afterward by Phillips) focuses on what happened to Phillips after he was taken hostage and held for ransom, which negotiations being conducted by the U.S. Navy.
After a brief introduction, which serves primarily to introduce us to Phillips as a family man, most of the movie is set either on the Maersk Alabama, or in the lifeboat the pirates use to escape and in which they take Phillips. Perhaps it's merely because we know what's going to happen, but even as the scenes aboard the ship start out slowly and calmly, with Phillips merely taking command, there is a sense of tension. There are warnings of piracy activities in the region, and as the Maersk Alabama begins to track the pirates on radar, that tension builds, leading up to the takeover and hostage taking.
The experiences of Phillips on the lifeboat are harrowing. Hanks does a superb job with the character - his most powerful scenes coming at the end, as he's released back into U.S. custody and gets taken to the warship's sick bay and begins to break down as he's examined by a doctor. Those scenes are rife with emotion. It's impossible not to be drawn into the character at that moment and to begin to wonder just what the experience would have been like. It really was a brilliant performance by Hanks, who built the character slowly but surely over the course of the movie, leading to that final scene.
Some of the Maersk Alabama's crew members have challenged the accuracy of the film. Some have suggested that Phillips was not as much of a hero as the film suggests and that he was, in fact, to some extent to blame for what happened by not listening to warnings to stay 600 km off the coast of Somalia (the Maersk Alabama was only a little over 200 km off the Somali coast when this happened.) I can't vouch for the history, of course, except to note that it's obviously filmed from Phillips' perspective, being based on Phillips' book about the incident. As a movie though, this is in fact quite gripping, and it's one of Hanks finest performances. The movie even manages to take a fairly even-handed approach to the pirates, not portraying them as evil but rather more as desperate people living in a desperate part of the world. (8/10)