Entertaining and informative

Rating: 6/10 (6 June 2014)

I actually served in Task Force 150, the international fleet dedicated to anti-piracy operations in the Indian Ocean and this brought back a lot of memories. We never caught any pirates but that's largely because if they saw something big, grey and pointy on the horizon they'd dump their weapons overboard and play act at being fishermen again (but I guess preventing hijacks was half the job).
Very interesting with a good performance from Hanks especially. How long since you saw a film dealing with the lives of ordinary sailors, the 'truckers of the sea'? Probably not since WW2 propaganda films frankly. It's interesting that Philips isn't necessarily depicted as the most popular captain in the world, very realistic in my experience, the company man who has to balance the welfare of his crew against the demands of his employers, the crew enduring long periods of isolation, danger and wearying duties at sea keen to get every penny they can in exchange for it, conscious of the value of their cargo and how important to the owners that it is delivered on time. Also a nice touch that we get to see the Somali side of things. It doesn't sugar coat it, these guys may have started out as fishermen who started hijacking foreign deepsea trawlers which had plundered their waters dry but we see that this is actually big business and organised accordingly. They're not depicted as evil (maybe that would be different today with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Somalia?), they're depicted as human, we can identify with them if not sympathise entirely.
Nice to see Max Martini, one of my favourite actors from The Unit who always seems to be portraying Special Forces types. A shame they never fitted in the true story of the CIA's Somali-speaking interpreters who made their first parachute jump each strapped onto a Navy SEAL, at night, directly into the shark infested Indian Ocean so that they could negotiate Philips' release. Always cracks me up the scene where the pirate who has been taken aboard the US warship to negotiate (thus neatly reducing the number of targets the SEAL snipers have to simultaneously take out by a quarter at a stroke) is informed that his friends are all dead, Philips is free and he's now under arrest in no uncertain terms, going from holding all the cards to holding zip in a matter of seconds.
Favourite scene however has to be when they phone up the US Navy's emergency helpline and no one answers, the sort of thing that happens in real life but you'd never see portrayed in fiction (at least the Royal Navy answers the phone even if the WREN on duty can't offer anything but hopeful advice).