![]() ![]() ![]() The final act of the film takes place (as followers of the news will recall), with the pirates and their last hostage, Phillips, crowded into a tiny, airless, covered lifeboat, surrounded by the overwhelming force of the U.S. Navy warships arrive on the scene, it has become clear that their true advantage lies in their willingness to die. Initially, their advantage seems to reside in their willingness to kill. The pirates have the weapons, but no sense of the ship and-once it becomes clear to them that the crew does not intend to cooperate cheerfully with their $10 million ransom demand-no real idea of what to do next. The crew of the Alabama have the numbers, but not the weapons. What unfolds is an escalating game of cat and mouse, in which each side is defined more clearly by its weaknesses than its strengths. This time a band of four Somalis manages to board the ship, armed with AK-47s and palpable desperation, and the Alabama crew-most of whom have taken refuge in the engine room-begin resisting the takeover of their ship by any means available. In any case, pirates are encountered-their tiny craft dwarfed by their gargantuan prey-repelled with hoses, and then encountered again. advisory to remain at least 600 miles offshore. Greengrass takes various liberties with the ensuing plot, with perhaps the greatest being his failure to note that Phillips took his craft within 240 miles of the Somali coast, despite a U.S. Preparations are completed ( x metric tons of fresh water, y metric tons of fuel), anchors are weighed (“bow thrusters!” “dead slow ahead!”), and the vessel-and with it the film-gets underway. (Don’t worry: It recedes noticeably over time.) Phillips banters with his wife (a thoroughly wasted Catherine Keener) about their grown children, about the changing world (“Everything’s different, big wheels a’ turning”), and other comparably tedious bits of backstory/foreshadowing.Īs soon as Phillips is aboard his immense cargo ship in Oman, however, preparing to embark around the horn of Africa to Mombasa, Greengrass’s film settles into a comfortable groove, spare and realistic. It begins unpromisingly, with the titular Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) packing for his upcoming voyage and introducing us to his genuinely painful Boston accent. The pirates are even led by a relatively sensible, conciliatory fellow (wonderfully played by first-time actor and Somali refugee Barkhad Abdi), who is cowed by his ever-more-intemperate compatriots …īut on to the film itself. But as inexact-and to some, no doubt, unreasonable-as the comparison may be, I can’t be the only one who noticed the thematic similarities. It is a thrilling true tale of adventure and courage in the face of deprivation, death threats and mock executions and also a compulsively readable first-hand account of the terrors of high-seas hostage-taking.Is Paul Greengrass’s Captain Phillips the most inadvertently resonant movie of the year? The film is, of course, based on the real-life hijacking of the Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates in 2009, not on the real-life hijacking of the federal government by a few dozen GOP House members last week. In A Captain's Duty, Richard Phillips tells his own extraordinary story - that of an ordinary man who did what he saw as his duty and in so doing became a hero. And so began a tense five-day stand-off, which ended in a daring high-seas rescue by U.S. What the pirates didn’t expect was that the crew would fight back, nor did they expect Captain Phillips to offer himself as a hostage in exchange for the safety of his crew - a courageous gesture that resulted in his being held captive on a tiny life-boat off the anarchic, gun-plagued coast of Somalia. It was the first time an American cargo ship had been hijacked in over 200 years. Ordinary that is until, two hundred or so miles off the east coast of Africa, armed Somali pirates attacked and boarded the freighter. 8th April 2009 was just an ordinary day for 53 -year-old Richard Phillips, captain of the United States-registered cargo vessel, the Maersk Alabama, as it headed towards the port of Mombasa.
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