Movie review — Greyhound. Tom Hanks and Apple TV+ deliver a…
By: John Sherrod
Tags: Review, Movies, TV, Streaming, Apple

Movie review — Greyhound

As someone who has spent two decades writing about Apple and movies/TV, I never thought those two categories would be combined, but here I am reviewing a Tom Hanks-led WWII drama with the phrase “An Apple Original Film” in the opening and closing credits. It’s a bit surreal.

Greyhound starring Tom Hanks, who also wrote the screenplay, is a taut naval thriller that feels built to please people who enjoy watching World War II documentaries. I’m certainly in that category, and I loved this film. But my wife, who is not a fan of war films per se and is not a WWII history nerd, also enjoyed the film.

Greyhound tells the story of the U.S.S. Greyhound, a U.S. Navy destroyer led by Captain Krause (Hanks) on his first Atlantic crossing as captain. The year is 1942, and the Greyhound is charged with protecting a convoy of naval and merchant ships carrying troops and supplies to England to support the Allied war effort. Most of the action takes place in “the Pit” and area in the middle of the North Atlantic that’s too far from either the U.S. mainland or England for the ships to have air support. So they’re on their own to spot and fight off attacks on the convoy by German U-boats. It’s in this most dangerous part of the crossing that Krause and crew are put to the test as a pack of German U-boats attack the convoy.

One of the things I love about Greyhound is that it’s extremely well-paced. It’s telling a pretty compact story, and keeps the runtime at just 91 minutes. It feels fast, but not rushed.

I’m not nearly enough of an expert on the subject to tell you how realistic this film is, but it feels very realistic. It captures the mundane aspects of naval combat in extreme detail, particularly in the way that information is relayed two and from the captain (particularly with the sonar and radar crewmen). You do have to pay attention to all of that dialog to feel like you’re properly following the action, but it’s not at all boring.

The movie this film is probably most like is the classic The Enemy Below, although in Greyhound we never get the perspective of the German sailers on the U-boat (though we do hear their taunting radio messages to the U.S. vessels). That single point of view gives us less of a holistic view of the battle, but it serves to make the U-boats feel more menacing because they’re so mysterious.

As a Christian, I like that Captain Krause is depicted as a man of faith. He starts and ends his days in prayer. When the Greyhound sinks its first U-boat, a crewman gleefully tells the captain, “That’s 50 less Krauts!” The captain quickly corrects him with, “50 lost souls.” I think it’s important that war films depict the true cost of war in that way.

Since Greyhound is an Apple TV+ original, the only way to watch it for now is with an Apple TV+ subscription, though if you’ve bought an Apple device in the last ten months or so, you can get a free year-long trial of Apple TV+. I’m not sure how many new subscribers Greyhound is going to bring it, but it’s a really enjoyable film, and I think must-watch for fans of WWII films.