Prepare to have your emotions boarded - Captain Phillips is certainly worth seeing.

Rating: 7/10 (28 February 2019)

"Captain Phillips" works well as a dramatic piece rather than as any terrific character study or deep, involved piece of story-telling; it is a picture-perfect exercise in execution of suspense - nobody ever really feels safe and it is difficult, due to it being of no real fixed genre or possessive of a stone-wall story, to entirely tie down as to where it will all end up as you watch it unfold. As it roars towards its finale on the open seas of the Indian Ocean, all four of the feasible possibilities that I counted pertaining to who lives; who dies and what anybody gets away with are still open to happening.
Paul Greengrass' film, based on the true events which befell poor Captain Richard Phillips of the container ship Maersk Alabama and his crew in 2009, may very well be entitled as such, and indeed sold as a film depicting the events which involved said man, but it is really about three captains: an ordinary captain of a container ship; a pirate captain and then later a Navy captain who commands a gunship. By the end, when Phillips has been forced onto the side-lines - relegated to a supporting act in his own supposed film - the battle has moved on from its beginnings and into the uncharted territories whereby the pirate goes up against the soldier who is himself forced into his own series of predicaments and moral cul-de-sacs pertaining to who potentially lives and who potentially dies.
Tom Hanks is the eponymous Philips, an uncomplicated man whose life story to this point the film does not seem to think important. Aged around fifty, he and his wife live in an affluent neighbourhood in the wilderness of Vermont. They drive around, worrying about the world they live in, which is becoming a more desperate place to live and apparently changing too dramatically. Are they referring to the then-recent economic crash? The spread of terror in spite of a war on terror? We cannot tell. One thing they do admit to is a worry for their adult children, whose prospects in a swelling job market appear gloomy.
Meanwhile, a million hypothetic miles away, a Somali terror cell rapidly concoct a gang of misfits to engage in some piracy on the open waves - their target is a freighter of some kind. The Somali strand moves very quickly; is causality driven - its golden brown tones are a stark contrast to the chilly blues of Vermont. Eventually, we witness our Phillips traverse to Oman, where he will commandeer a freighter ship and take it to port in Asia.
Eventually, when both sides are out and on the waves off the coast of Africa, there is a coming together when Phillips' ship seems to drift away from the beaten ground of the shipping lanes and the pirates' crude radar systems reveal such a thing. One of them makes the observation that it has 'wondered away from the herd' and we realise they might just as well be back in their native land hunting some sort of animal. In a genuinely sharp piece of direction, Greengrass kept the actors portraying the crews of the container ship and the pirate boat away from one another so that their initial contact is the first time they all meet anyway... Whilst the pirates have the guns, they are clueless as to the layout of the boat, which of course the crew know inside out - this is a dynamic executed perfectly and entertainingly without being exploitative.
The film allows for a basic degree of characterisation between the two crews, dialogue from the pirates outline where they are coming from and why they do what they do. They are quick to stress that they are not terrorist affiliated - most likely, they couldn't give a damn what America fund the Israelis to do to Palestine: it is strictly business, but does the film dodge tackling something a little more substantial because of this? At one other point, the film affords a member of either crew synergy through thematic when one of Phillips' points out that "...we (I) didn't sign up to the Navy" when it seems conflict with an armed group is inevitable, while a pirate who cuts himself on a trap made form broken glass points out he "...didn't come along for this" Both are getting more than they bargained for.
Greengrass' approach to the material is to essentially begin the film as a heist picture, one wherein things do not all go according to plan for those attempting the heist; throughout the middle act, there are echoes of "Die Hard" as the victims of a very sudden, potentially violent, assault must use their wits to get out of it. Amusingly, this develops into a final act which seems to borrow heavily from "Dog Day Afternoon" for reasons I will not reveal. Not knowing a single thing about the events depicted in the film may have helped in it being as affecting as it was, but this is still a very well made drama with excellent attention to aesthetic and pacing. If you are unfamiliar with the true-story, or indeed the book "A Captain's Duty" which depicts the events of those fateful few days, you will no doubt enjoy "Captain Phillips".