Dangerous Sea.

Rating: 8/10 (8 December 2014)

The title is accurate; the docudrama is about Captain Richard Phillips, whose huge American cargo ship was boarded by four teen-aged Somali pirates in 2009. Phillips himself was taken hostage and kept aboard the Maersk Albama's lifeboat, to be held for millions of dollars in ransom. It didn't work. The five men were crowded into the fiberglass lifeboat for a day or two. The US Navy intervened. The pirate chieftain was taken prisoners, the others shot by Navy Seals, and Phillips was released.
It gets off to a rather sluggish start, ahead dead slow, except that no Master issues orders like that anymore. Our first views of the Maersk Alabama drain all the romance from our fantasies about life at sea. First of all, the ship is so long and so tall that when it's in port you can't identify it as a ship. It looks like a city, an industrial city. Second, there is no glamor on the bridge. No messenger stands by; no one at the engine controls; there's no one at the helm -- there's no HELM. The ship is all computerized. You want to change course? You push a button. Where did it all go? (Sob.)
As the ship's master, Tom Hanks does a decent job, brisk, efficient, calm in the face of troubled waters -- until the last few minutes, when he lets loose. He's had gun muzzles at his temple, his forehead, and his throat, and he's been whacked several times with rifle butts and been beaten with fists. He's had blood splattered all over him.
After the lifeboat is recovered, Hanks is taken to the sick bay on the destroyer Bainbridge, where he's checked out and treated by a female CPO. Hanks is so shaken he can barely speak. The CPO has no such problem. She can't shut up. "Are you okay? You don't look okay? Are you okay? Does this hurt?" There's no chance for Hanks to respond, nor is any response expected. And, while still examining the shocked Hanks, she addresses comments to her assistant in the usual detached tone of a medical provider who is describing an assemblage of organs. Soothingly to Hanks: "You're okay now. Just relax." In clipped, efficient tones to the assistant: "Laceration on the right temple."
Very nice scenes of ships at sea, depictions of devices to repel boarders that I'd never dreamed of, and a convincing picture of the discomfort of being aboard an unventilated lifeboat of shallow draft, bouncing around in the ocean, throwing bodies to and fro, banging their heads against the bulkheads. And no sentimental flashbacks to Phillip's dreamy life at home -- the loving wife, the happy children, the rose-covered cottage in the vale. Like Phillips, the movie is all business.
The movie has a tougher time with the pirates. They could have made off safely with thirty thousand dollars but decided to take a hostage and demands thirty million. So how do you handle these guys? Their looks are so strikingly exotic that it's hard to tell one from another. Yet the story must differentiate them somehow. The pirate who is most nearly sympathetic to Hanks looks a little younger than the others. They were evidently all in their teens, the youngest perhaps fifteen, but they all look older than that. The pirate chief is given some cynical remarks about Hanks' naivté, and he wants above all to go to America. He's the one who's captured, not killed, and he gets his wish -- thirty-three years' worth.
There are still some puzzles about the film, though it was based on an "as-told-to" book by Phillips himself. I got the number of pirates mixed up. Maybe that's just the result of a mini-stroke. And I don't understand why a destroyer's bridge should be lighted with blue instead of red, a pretty cavalier treatment of the Purkinje effect. We barely see the members of Seal Team Six, and we don't know what their protocol is. "Two targets red -- one green, one fuschia." And if the movie needed a touch of humor, we could at least have heard the most prominent radio talk show pundit in America, describing the pirates as "just a couple of scared kids trying to get home", a real-life interpretation of the event. Yes, he actually said it.