"They're not here to fish"

Rating: 10/10 (18 October 2013)

While we were fighting terrorists in two different theaters of war after the 9/11 attacks, nobody could have anticipated than an old-world form of terrorism, namely high-seas piracy, would come back in style. But that's what befell the crew of the American cargo ship Maersk Alabama in April 2009, when four Somali pirates took over their vessel, resulting in a three-day ordeal in which the captain of the ship, Richard Phillips, was held hostage for a $10 million ransom. That ransom was never paid; and a team of Navy Seals managed to end the crisis by killing the four pirates, who had been holding Phillips hostage in an escape boat less than two hundred miles from the Somali coast. Phillips and his crew, however, all survived the horrific ordeal, shaken but alive. This is the true story told in the movie CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, based on the book "A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea" by Phillips and co-writer Stephan Talty.
Effectively directed by Paul Greengrass, whose penchant for docudrama was perhaps best established in the much-lauded, and intense, 2006 9/11 film UNITED 93, CAPTAIN PHILLIPS stars Tom Hanks in the title role, of the captain who, aware that armed Somali pirates were present in the waters of the Indiana Ocean some six hundred miles east of Somalia, urges his crew to keep a lookout for any skiffs that seem to contain armed men. One such group, led by Abdi, approaches them; but through some skillful maneuvers, they manage to evade them. The next day, however, the Maersk Alabama isn't so lucky. Armed with automatic weaponry and with a better knowledge of American cargo ship tactics, Abdi and his four companions board the ship and hold Hanks and a few others hostage (this while Hanks has managed to get the rest of his crew below deck and out of sight. When one of the hijackers gets his foot badly injured by broken glass, Hanks urges them to get help, and leaves with them in the ship's escape boat. The pirates believe that Hanks is willing to be a hostage in an act of self-sacrifice; but all along, his crew on the Maersk Alabama, are tailing him and his captors; and the decision is made from Washington to end the crisis by the use of the Navy's elite Seal Team Six (the same one that would, in 2011, track down and kill Osama Bin-Laden). It all comes down to a fierce confrontation within a hundred miles of the Somali coastline.
The same sense of realism that infused UNITED 93 also informs CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, with Greengrass and his director of photography Ackroyd doing things largely in the same documentary, almost cinema verite, style that had worked for both UNITED 93 and Greengrass' 2002 docudrama BLOODY Sunday. Just as much of the success of the film, however, is also owed to the incredible Everyman performance of Hanks in the title role. His ability to do the Everyman role, exemplified in his portrayal of astronaut Jim Lovell in the 1995 Ron Howard classic APOLLO 13, works out quite well for him; and Barkhad Abdi makes for a particularly great adversary. There is a real sense of Greengrass, as he had done on UNITED 93 (as well as Hanks on APOLLO 13) of not wanting to do everything in CAPTAIN PHILLIPS as your typical Hollywood action blockbuster, and the end result, along with an intense score by Henry Jackman (which also interpolates the climactic cue of John Powell's score for UNITED 93) being the icing on this cake, is a tremendous piece—indeed, one of the best films of 2013, in the final analysis.