Our reach

Rating: Null/10 (22 January 2014)

Here we have a simple world where unseen wheels turn and bring men (on both sides) out to sea. We have simple emotional urges; get there or get out of there, and just physics of space. Standard tension carries the day in the story: will the pirates board the ship? okay, but will they find the crew? okay, but will they make the hostage switch? okay but will they make it to the coast? and so on, bobbing us up and down. We have that dry and solemn tone of procedure that movies take on when they deal with the US military in the area, Bigelow's films come to mind—we're meant to see the quiet commitment to get our man back, the everyman Hanks.
Boring. But within those limits there is a pretty lovely spatial play, as lovely as the plot is unremarkable. Simple contrasts: in and out, close confines against open vastness, ship mechanics against the abstract sea, Somali chaos against American precision. But within that, some great eye motion, one to relative distance, to the unfolding of space.
If you look, what the filmmakers were looking to manipulate were our intentional threads reaching out to this man who we want to see saved, have the reaching and anticipation as visual as possible. So what they do is they try to avoid as much as possible framing omnisciently, and stretch that eye to intentional distance by having the next action fire its trajectory in that vision, and cut before completion so the motion pulls our own intentional tethers taut. My favorite bits are the view of the ship from the approaching Somali skiffs, a flare fired from the ship and seen through beams of water, and all that last part with the towing of the lifeboat towards the lights, the tether bringing back our man against dark waters.
Essentially, it is the same expertly calibrated cinematic machine as that which is able to swoop from the horizon and find the protagonist in the middle of nowhere. Anyone who merely reads 'shaky cam' in a film like this seems to me to have boarded the least adventurous cinematic boat: the touristy one that does a tour of the bay instead of the one that sails out to deep sea. It's still not very fulfilling once you pull back to the whole picture, but get up close and perception is its own art and richness—there will be more to say about this in a comment about Gravity.
So anyway, we have all that tension mounting, gears snap and whir into place. It builds up all that energy, the last part with snipers getting in position and the ship towing the boat. So the question is: do you cleanse? do you let out a little and in what direction?
You'll see what they did in the film. Hanks wonderfully makes his own part work, letting out just little enough for us to know that all his gears of self have snapped but his wife is there in that room after being saved. But this is because he is first given room for it, he is the hero.
How would it be to give the same room to the Somali captain? No politics here, not putting them in equivalent ground, just find that man in the moment of stepping into what is essentially the future, the front part of the train of civilization to his last that he leaves behind on the coast. And mine the irony of his going to America, and have the Somali actor layer on that his own journey there. It would be an exceptional thing.