High Tension At Sea

The docudrama Captain Phillips has been earning rave reviews from both critics and audiences alike. I saw it over the Thanksgiving weekend and was not disappointed.

I've never been a fan of Tom Hanks, but his performance in this film would probably earn him another Oscar (let's reserve our final judgement until we see Robert Redford in his upcoming movie All Is Lost)! He's so good as a regular guy that even the real-life Captain Richard Phillips was impressed. He met with Hanks three times in the last two years at his Vermont farmhouse prior to filming.

In real life, Hanks is an extremely funny guy. Not only did he disclose to the world that he's suffering from Type 2 diabetes on the Late Show with David Letterman, but he also talked about his friendship with the four Somali actors who were recruited from Minneapolis - the largest concentration of Somalis in the U.S. He joked about their names without sounding like a racist, and it was extremely funny - who else would have friends called Barkhad, Barkhad, Faysal and Mahat? Even though they were novice actors, Barkhad Abdi, who played Muse in the film, was almost as good as Hanks himself. It was reported that Hanks didn't get a chance to meet his Somali co-actors until the first scene when they appeared on board the ship without any translators at work in order to create the tensest scene possible.

Kudos go to director Paul Greengrass, a Cambridge-educated Brit, who's best known for his two movies within the Bourne franchise - The Bourne Ultimatum and The Bourne Supremacy - and United 93. He was able to make a docudrama so tense and captivating that by the end of the movie, my knees were still shaking. In fact, the second half of the film was so tense that you'd almost want to scream aloud for the hijacked captain. Towards the end of the movie, it's obvious that the captain was suffering from intense post-traumatic stress. In fact, the real-life Phillips told USA Today that for a period of time, he would wake up at 5 a.m. every day crying like a baby and remembering how lucky he was to be alive. Although this aftermath was not included in the movie, Tom Hanks gave us a strong enough performance for us to almost weep with him when we saw him safe.

The real-life captain gave a lot of credit to the Navy SEALs whom he regarded as the real heroes who saved him. There have been a lot of movies about the SEALs' bravery, but their action in this film made you wish that every country could have a team of heroes and protectors like Max Martini and his cool SWAT team.

The real tragedy of this whole true story is really the dire livelihood led by millions in Somalia. The deprived fishermen turned pirates consider these hijackings at sea as ordinary business. So until they can find some decent means of making a living, they will continue to be pirates. As Captain Phillips asked in the film, "There's gotta be a better way to live than hijacking ships and harming people?" "Only in America," Muse responded..."Only in America!" And the irony is that he finally got a chance to see America, but from prison!