Captain phillips movie#
Captain phillips pro#

Significantly, both movies also feature hostilities breaking out in the middle of a training drill, causing key characters to explain in almost identical language that this is a 'real world' situation, a blurring of the lines between reconstruction and reality, something that underpins Greengrass's distinctive directorial style. There are clear echoes of Greengrass's previous docudrama United 93, which similarly spent time with its hijackers prior to their attack.

Captain phillips pro#

At their first on-screen confrontation, the seasoned Hollywood pro and fiery first-timer produce tangible sparks as Muse orders Phillips to 'Look me in the eye – I'm the captain now!' Inevitably, the power struggle between these two men becomes emblematic of the film's wider culture-clash themes, with both depicted as pawns in a much larger game over which neither has any control. This Greengrass has found in the shape of newcomer Barkhad Abdi, an electrifying screen presence who brilliantly captures both the raging determination and embattled desperation of the pirates' emergent leader, Muse. Once the pirates are on board this becomes a tale of a ship with two captains, and it's critical that Hanks is matched by an equal and opposite force to prevent the drama from becoming unbalanced. From the early scenes of buttoned-down, pressed-shirt reserve to the later gruelling episodes of Castaway-style physical degradation, he rarely misses a beat. 'Is that it?' he asks, turning on the hoses, swinging the rudders, grabbing a flare, suddenly aware of how isolated he and his ship have become.Īs the working man out of his depths in murky waters, having to make life-and-death decisions in explosively confrontational circumstances, Hanks combines the everyman charm of a latterday Jimmy Stewart with the growing sense of heroism that underwrote his cool-headed Jim Lovell in Apollo 13. As two tiny skiffs skeeter across the ocean toward the Maersk Alabama, we see Phillips sending out a distress signal ('They're not here to fish!'), only to be told to observe standard protocol and hang tight. Tom Hanks gives the performance of a lifetime as the eponymous Phillips, the former Boston cabbie turned hard-working sea captain who earns an increasingly hard-won dollar piloting vast ships through treacherous waters without clear backup or onboard protection. For all its action aesthetics and nail-biting, gut-wrenching tension, this is on some level a film about globalisation, about what happens when the paths of the very poor and the very rich intersect in the crossfire of world economics.

Captain phillips movie#

While the title namechecks the American sea captain upon whose book this movie is partly based, our first encounter with the young Somalis who chase and board the gigantic Maersk Alabama is on the shores of their homeland, delving (briefly but significantly) into the poverty that drives fishermen to risk life and limb in pursuit of deep sea big game.