Captain Phillips: A pulse-pounding thriller

Captain Phillips is a pulse-pounding dramatization of a real-life pirate attack and high-seas kidnapping off the coast of Somalia in 2009. There is a controversy over the portrayal of the captain as a hero, which some in the real crew dispute. If we can ignore that, this is a fast-paced survival thriller sharing the underpinnings of brawny American militarism with recent flicks like Argo and Zero Dark Thirty (Incidentally, Captain Phillips and Zero dark Thirty both involve daring military operations authorized by President Obama) but goes beyond them, at least for me, in terms of cinematic experience.

Paul Greengrass’s quasi-documentary style with shaky handy-cams impart a sense of immediacy throughout and he keeps that alive for more than 2 hours of movie’s running time. The intense camerawork goes hand in hand with the movie’s fast pace as Tom Hank’s character hints at a survival tale ahead while driving to the airport and then dives into defending his cargo ship when he sees the blip on the radar. Interspersed with Pirates’ parallel preparations on the Somali coast to attack cargo, the movie represents parallel worlds – the bone-thin Africans fighting over and chewing Khat (narcotic leaves native to horn of Africa ) and the fleshy Americans gulping down Coffee and moving thousands of tonnes of ‘food aid’. And soon both the worlds come to collide in the high seas.

While the 2 Somalian skiffs target and attack the monstrous American cargo ship, like a predator does a prey, notwithstanding the fact that the ship was not armed, the initial moralistic positions of Somalians and Americans that lead to the Pirates hijacking the ship are palpable. While the Americans are at their job and talk about ‘not getting paid to fight pirates’, the Somalian pirates would be forced week after week by their bosses to get millions of dollars worth cargo through their attacks and of course they have no other livelihood (the pirates say their fishing reserves were depleted because of international fishing vessels). That paints them as those fighting for their survival in the first act of the movie, till they kidnap the Captain. Later Captain Phillips is shown as the one fighting for survival. Even the empathy is distributed for both parties revealed in the way Phillips empathizes with his chief captor Abduwali Muse that they all have bosses when Muse says his boss won’t accept him coming ashore without millions of dollars worth loot. In fact,when Captain Phillips takes the ride to the airport on his way to the voyage along with his wife, he shares his worry with her about their son not doing enough at college to ‘survive in the fast changing world’. That way, an almost fatherly thread in Captain’s relation with his hostage is revealed when he almost advices the young naive Muse, his captor, who dreams of living and ‘driving his car’ in America, that there sure must be something apart from fishing and piracy to survive in his life. Of course, Muse responds by saying “Maybe in America”. Sometime later, when he is advised by Phillips to surrender, he says ‘he has gone too far’ and further displays his helplessness behind his tough-as-nut actions. It is this emotion amidst the action that elevates this movie into an engaging thriller, despite the known and obvious ending.

The 3 monstrous ships following the lifeboat and then towing it later with a 100 feet line makes for amazing visuals on a shaky handy cam, which increases the authenticity and ratchets up the tension while the plot takes its turns with random gunshots and a failed escape attempt by Phillips. And that is despite the fact that we know the ending of this real-life story. Partly, that could be because the movie stresses on the experiences of the characters. So much so that even after the captain is rescued, we don’t have the usual ritualistic ‘happy ending’ scenes but rather the captain’s breakdown scene! I did see that almost everyone watching the movie sat through these scenes. That is how Paul Grassman, Screenwriter Billy Ray and Tom Hanks won.

Tom Hanks while underplaying, even with minimal dialogue, is at his best. The 4 pirates are all played by first-time actors of Somalian descent from Minneapolis and perform so well and make Captain Phillips a must watch for lovers of thrillers.