Director Paul Greengrass says he thought the film would feel more authentic if it was all shot at sea.
He had personal motivations, too: "My father was in the Merchant Marine and was at sea all his life so I wanted to explore his world," he says.
From NYTimes
“Captain Phillips,” a movie that insistently closes the distance between us and them, has a vital moral immediacy.
It was directed by Paul Greengrass, the British filmmaker who quickened the pulse of contemporary action cinema with the second and third installments in the Bourne franchise, features that proved yet again that big-screen thrills and thought need not be mutually exclusive.
Kinetic action and intelligence are similarly the driving forces in “Captain Phillips,” which, like Mr. Greengrass’s Bourne movies, shakes you up first with its style and then with its ideas.
The story is based on shivery, true events that unfolded in early April 2009,
when four armed Somalis seized the Maersk Alabama, an American
container ship under the command of Richard Phillips.
The ship, with an
unarmed crew of just 20 sailors, was hauling tons of cargo in hundreds
of containers, including food from the United Nations World Food Program
designated for African countries.
To the Somalis, the ship apparently
looked like a floating jackpot.
What happened next played out in world
news, and Captain Phillips went on to write, with Stephan Talty, a
plodding, straightforward book with the telegraphing title “A Captain’s
Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea.”
“Captain Phillips” is based on “A Captain’s Duty,” and while they trace a similar narrative arc and share numerous details, they’re worlds apart in terms of sensibility.
Written by Billy
Ray (whose credits include “Shattered Glass”), it opens with a
postcard-perfect shot of a white Vermont house.
Inside, Captain Phillips
(Tom Hanks)
is packing up and checking his route.
He and his wife, a nurse, Andrea
(Catherine Keener, who’s there to underscore Phillips’s decency), are
soon on their way to the airport and murmuring about their children, the
future and a fast, scarily changing world.
There’s a stiltedness to
their talk — and Mr. Hanks leads too hard with a broad Boston accent —
yet the scene’s intimacy, and the couple’s vulnerabilities, immediately
humanize Phillips.
Mr. Greengrass likes to work fast.
One
minute Phillips is hugging his wife at the airport and the next he’s
walking the decks of the Maersk Alabama, testing its unlocked security
gates and running his crew through a safety drill. Almost as soon as the
crew finishes the exercise, it’s confronted with a real-world threat:
two rapidly approaching skiffs.
Phillips and the crew dodge the skiffs
by increasing their speed (the real ship’s speed topped out at 18 knots,
or about 21 miles per hour) and shifting course to churn up
destabilizing waves.
Badly rocked, their jerry-built engines sputtering,
the skiffs turn back, but the next day, one returns with four heavily
armed Somali men.
Led by Muse (the newcomer Barkhad Abdi, very, very
fine), the Somalis board the Alabama, initiating a harrowing siege.
At the time of the hijacking, a lot of the
news reports focused on Captain Phillips and the nominal exoticism of a
21st-century piracy that had nothing to do with illegal downloads,
football or Johnny Depp swashbuckling through a Disney franchise.
The
existential realities that inform contemporary Somali piracy turn out to
be one of the unexpected themes of “Captain Phillips,” which begins as
something of a procedural about men at work and morphs into a jittery
thriller even as it also deepens, brilliantly, unexpectedly, into an
unsettling look at global capitalism and American privilege and power.
Phillips is unambiguously a heroic figure,
but he’s scarcely the sole point of interest in a movie that steadily
and almost stealthily asserts the agonized humanity of his captors.
This humanization hits you like a jolt.
The
shock isn’t that the pirates are people, however corrupted.
But that
even as the movie’s rhythms quicken along with your own — Mr. Greengrass
works you over like a deep-tissue pugilist with smash cuts, racing
cameras and a propulsive soundtrack so you feel the urgency as well as
see it — an argument is being created.
There is, you realize, meaning
here beyond the plot, meaning in the barren Somali hamlet in which Muse
and his companions congregate under warlord gunpoint and in the razored
angles of their startling, gaunt faces.
There’s meaning, too, in the
wild eyes and stained teeth of men who never eat, but stuff their thin
cheeks with khat, the amphetaminelike plant that, among its uses, helps
suppress the appetite.
After the Somalis take over the Alabama, the action downshifts and the
story settles uneasily into a tense standoff with Muse and Phillips now
staring warily at each other across the ship’s bridge rather than across
the water through binoculars.
Mr. Hanks is one of the few movie stars
who, like Gary Cooper once upon a Hollywood time, can convey a sense of
old-fashioned American decency just by standing in the frame.
There’s
something so unforced about him that it can seem as if he’s not
delivering a performance, just being Tom Hanks.
This feeling of
authenticity, however well honed and movie made, dovetails with
Phillips’s gruff likability to create a portrait of a man trying to keep
himself, his crew and his ship together even as the world he knew comes
violently undone.
That reality grows progressively more uneasy
with the arrival of the American military, which descends with expected
might in warships that loom over the crisis like idled, waiting giants.
Throughout “Captain Phillips,” Mr. Greengrass plays with scale,
proportion and camera angles to underscore the differences at play in
the story; there’s an early aerial shot of Phillips walking on the deck
of the Alabama and dwarfed by a ship that in turn drifts like a speck on
the water.
Later, these extremes accentuate the paradoxes of the story —
the tiny Somalis scrambling aboard an enormous American ship — that
grow more pointed and political, as when a group of hugely muscled Navy
personnel arrive and begin gearing up for a finale in which there seem
to be many Goliaths but no David.
What comes after isn’t a surprise, even if
“Captain Phillips,” which revs you up with frenzied action and violent
spectacle, does surprise by denying you the usual action-movie high.
Because just as the movie races toward its foregone conclusion, it also
begins siphoning off the excitement it has been building up all along.
The big men with the big guns do their part, but the skin-prickling,
carnal excitement that almost inevitably comes with certain types of
screen violence never manifests, replaced instead by dread, anxiety, a
shaking man and whole a lot of blood.
It’s the kind of blood that most
movies avoid and that, Mr. Greengrass suggests, is what remains unseen
in global traumas like this.
Some viewers may pump their fists but, I
think, he wants this victory to shatter you.
This footage was shot by real pirates, off the coast of Somalia.
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