Interesting story, OK execution

Rating: 6/10 (9 October 2016)

A ship gets stuck in a storm. Now a team has to be sent to the ship, to rescue as many people as possible.
The movie was directed by Craig Gillespie, a director who has not made a lot of movies. Yet. He has previously made movies in cooperation with Disney. This time he did it again for "The Finest Hours". Gillespie did a very good job at directing. He used a lot of cool camera movements, that a lot of the time worked. Sometimes when he used them on see and the shot transfers to a green screen one, but he tries to hide it and make it look like it was one take, were sometimes nauseating. But he also has used some good one-take scenes, like the first time where they are saying how fast and at which degree they have to sail. I was fairly impressed by that scene. The second time it had less power, because we had seen it before. He did however knew how to create tension. There were some really tenseful scenes, but sometimes he just dragged them out that tiny bit to far. Some decisions he made were pretty daubtable. Like constantly editing away from the tanker, even when the rescue crew was already away. The cool, good and interesting things are happening over there. Not on land. So I don't get why he decided to constantly edit between those places. He also didn't pay a lot of attention to the details. The cold, for example. There was no way you could see that they were cold. There were no little clouds coming out of their mouth, there was no shivering... It's the details that make the movie. The set design was also pretty impressive. So were the clothes. They felt like it came from the 50'. The cgi and green screen were fine. When I read that they worked on the special effects for a year, I was expecting top notch effects, but instead I got the opposite. The green screen was very noticeable and off-putting. The characters looked too accentuated, because the edges of them looked a tiny bit blurred. The way how the boat moved in the sea looked very convincing to me, though. The editing was a bit to slow for me in the first act, but in the second and third they edit sometimes a bit to much to show the reaction of every actor, which was not necessary.
The acting was good. There were two main characters in the movie: one played by Chris Pine, one played by Casey Affleck. Let's start with Chris Pine. Overall he was fine. His accent was consistent and in the emotional scenes he preformed very well, but when he was talking for a long time, he reminded me of Mark Wahlberg in "The Happening", which is not a compliment. But the other moments weigh up to this, so on average I would say he was fine. Casey Affleck was really good in the movie. He gave one of his better performances in the last couple of years. It was much better than his performance in the movie that also came out in 2016 called "Tripple 9" Not a good movie. He had some moments where I could see he was acting, so that's my only really criticism about him. Holliday Grainger was very good. She played Miriam.
The writing was the biggest problem of the movie. The story was good, because otherwise I wouldn't have decide to watch the thing. Just the first act was done badly. The love story between Pine and Grainger was not that relevant to the story in my opinion it didn't emote me in the end, so the point of all this is not clear to me. What also made the first act not bearable was the chemistry between Pine and Grainger. They didn't fit together at all. The character of Miriam was interesting, though, but just wrongly integrated into the movie, whereby they made her boring. That's also why I said in the beginning of my review, that the land-stuff was not interesting. Pines character was also so stupid in the beginning of the movie. with this I don't mean that his character was a dull/silly character. No he was genially stupid. I think they might've tried to make him seem to be in love, or awkward, but they just failed in that aspect. The character of Casey Affleck was good. He was a likable character, so you were rooting for him. You wanted him to get of the boat. The story is also very predictable, but I already knew what I was getting myself into before even watching the movie. And it's a Disney movie. That says enough.
In the end this movie was an OK attempt at recreating a true story. There were some problems, but nothing that bad, that the movie is unwearable. That's why this movie get's a 6.0/10 from me.