You certainly won’t be falling asleep during the lengthy cat-and-mouse sequence. The hijacking of the Maersk Alabama is tense. All of the sudden mortality is on the table and the film never treats that circumstance lightly. The first time Phillips and crew hear a gun go off they’re terrified. Gunshots, for instance, go a lot further here than in most entertainment in an age where we can spend hours on end interacting with a digital world using only an RPG. The film puts a lot of stock into honest humanity and characterization. For Muse, it entails making a living on a commercially overfished coast as a pirate. For Phillips, that entails extended periods of time away from his family and dealing with difficult union employees. A man who, just like Phillips, sets to the seas to do what his life demands he do. Muse and his fellow pirates aren’t portrayed as villains in Captain Phillips. These back and forth sequences set an important precedent. Where Phillips chides his crew for overextending their coffee break, Muse and his village are urged, at gunpoint, to take miniscule speed boats out on the open seas and bring home a pirate’s bounty. Where Phillips drives a minivan to the airport with his wife, Muse sleeps in a rugged shack on the Somali coast. The film’s first act follows two men, the aforementioned Phillips and the pirate Abduwali Muse, through their respective mornings. Not that any of that mattered to me, the viewer, within the context of the film itself, because when the credits rolled on Captain Phillips journalistic accuracy was the last thing on my mind. There’s been a bit of a ruckus stirred by the crew of the Maersk Alabama regarding Phillips’ heroic portrayal in the film and it is perhaps worth noting that the film never displays a black screen with those ominous, all too familiar words – “Based on true events.” Though it is emblazoned across every piece of the film’s promotional material, even the credits specify that it is based on Phillips’ book. The film, directed by Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum), follows the 2009 hijacking of the cargo ship Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates and is based on Captain Richard Phillips’ written account of the events from the book A Captain’s Duty.
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