Interchangeable Naval personnel give and receive orders via radio. That lower left-hand corner of the screen keeps flashing datelines. Unlike the concurrent Gravity, which brilliantly sustains tension by never cutting away from its protagonist, Captain Phillips lets us in on the turning of wheels to which neither Phillips nor his opponent/captor, the pirate leader Abdulwali Abdukhad Muse (Barkhad Abdi, giving a performance at least as persuasive as Hanks'), are privy. Maybe those tears Jessica Chastain shed in the last shot of Zero Dark Thirty were for our national soul (I doubt it), but I don't think this pair of scenes, wherein Phillips is too drained to speak, walk unassisted or do anything other than howl and weep is intended as a metaphor for anything. It takes an extra few minutes, after the Navy has rescued Phillips from his captors, to show us see how exhausted, frightened, and sickened he is by the ordeal - and no one is likely to mistake that response for ingratitude. And while Captain Phillips tells a far simpler story, covering days rather than years, both films strike me as Rorschach blots onto which anyone can project individual beliefs about how and when America swings its big stick.Įxcept - and I'll label this paragraph as a spoiler, mostly because Dana Stevens considered it as such in her Slate review - Captain Phillips doesn't quite end with the SEALs grimly/awesomely taking care of business. Like last year's Zero Dark Thirty, Greengrass' new movie is Based On A True Story and climaxes with a successful operation by Navy SEALs, those precision instruments that we rightly revere. What's empirical is that the film spends more screen time on the hapless, teenage pirates than on any of its other characters, save for Richard Phillips himself - played by America's everydad, Tom Hanks, whose next role will be that of Walt Disney. Unless, of course, it's a Dog Day Afternoon-style chronicle of the final days of a few sympathetically inept criminals who want money, not blood, but who end up dead anyway. Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdirahman share close quarters in Captain Phillips.Ĭaptain Phillips, Paul Greengrass' tense movie about the April 2009 hijacking of the freighter Maersk Alabama by four Somali pirates, is a love song to the patience-through-overwhelming-fire-superiority of the U.S.
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