Captain Phillips - film review

Tom Hanks opens the London Film Festival in this thrilling action film by British director Paul Greengrass, based on the 2009 Somali pirates hijacking of American container ship Maersk Alabama
23 October 2013

For its opening night gala, this year’s London Film Festival boasts a tour de force of action film-making from the British director Paul Greengrass.

In 2009, the unarmed American container ship Maersk Alabama was hijacked in international waters off the Horn of Africa by a small group of Somali pirates. The ensuing stand-off, between the Maersk’s captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks, calmly powerful, perfectly cast), and the desperate and determined pirate leader (newcomer Barkhad Abdi, also a commanding presence), ultimately involved a flotilla of US Navy ships and intervention by Navy SEALs.

In 2010, Phillips published a worthy book, A Captain’s Duty, about his experiences, digressing a good deal about his career and his wife’s ordeal at the hands of the media. Although the movie is based on this book, Greengrass has eliminated all such non-essentials, cutting straight to the chase. We see Captain Phillips driving to the airport with his wife to fly to his ship, but that’s all. And then we see the raggle-taggle Somali pirates being recruited by a gang boss, to play their part. For Greengrass and his scriptwriter Billy Ray give us the other side of the story too, understandably absent from Phillips’s account.

Without ever excusing piracy, by the end of the film the contrast between the immense US Navy ships and the tiny pirate forces, between such poverty and such lavish provision, comes to seem grotesque in our globalised world.

Greengrass’s career began as a TV documentary maker and includes many politically charged features like Omagh and Bloody Sunday as well as out-and-out thrillers such as the Bourne films and Green Zone. In Captain Phillips, as in United 93, he marries these skills seamlessly. Captain Phillips was filmed on board a ship exactly like the Alabama and none of the action is faked up with CGI. The lurching handheld camera follows the actors zealously as they scramble around the ship, staying right there with them even in the most oppressively enclosed spaces (the Director of Photography, Barry Ackroyd, deserves an Oscar). The editing too is extraordinarily kinetic and exciting. Captain Phillips grips you tight for all its 134 minutes.

Forget the nonsense of the superheroes whizzing around: this is a masterclass in what an action movie can really be. The festival couldn’t have begun better.

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