Didn't Deserve to Tank at the Box Office!

Rating: 8/10 (26 November 2018)

Have to admit I hadn't heard of this film till recently, probably because it was apparently such a commercial flop. More's the pity, as it tells a wonderfully engrossing and thrilling true life marine rescue on two levels; as seen from the rescued on the stricken SS Pendleton and their Coast Guard would - be rescuers.
Touted as being the story of the Coast Guard's greatest small boat rescue, it just seems a shame that such a fine film wasn't seen by a larger audience. Movies set on water seem to frequently have as high a disaster rate, as do the subjects with which they frequently deal (Water World, In the Heart of the Sea, Cutthroat Island etc.) and this seems to have suffered much the same fate.
The Finest Hours features a great cast with Chris Pine and Casey Affleck both outstanding, playing similarly shy, somewhat introverted leadership roles; the former as a junior Coast Guard officer asked to mount a small-scale rescue attempt and the latter as the doomed ship's chief engineer, improvising desperately to keep the mortally damaged tanker afloat as long as possible to afford a chance of rescue for the surviving crew members.
I really liked the highlighting of Holliday Grainger's Miriam. Though she was arguably perhaps fictionalised more than some of the other characters, in creating this strong onshore female, a powerful emotional core of the film was established. On the flip side of this, Eric Bana did his best in a fairly thankless role as the Coast Guard commander Daniel Cluff. Even just a brief perusal of his Wikipedia entry, indicates that he wasn't the self-doubting, inexperienced head of operations, we see in the film, created no doubt to provide an idealistic counterpoint to Chris Pine's almost laconically casual, Bernie Webber. In addition to this, Ben Foster stands out in a supporting role, where though having few lines of dialogue to speak, he imposes himself indelibly through a terrific range of facial expressions, glances and general body language.
Unlike a vehicle such as The Perfect Storm where one felt at times the special effects weighed down the (somewhat, slight) story being told, no such claim should be made about this movie. It achieves a very comfortable balance of CGI enhanced action, which never threatens to comparatively diminish the true elements of a remarkable story some 66 years old, that this film succeeds in recognising.