Other viewers could very easily have been merchant mariners, judging by their appearance and willingness to venture out early in the morning. By any accounts, it’s a terrific movie, in spite of the fact that the ending is well known to viewers both inside and outside the maritime industries.
To a large extent, the film is based on a book written by the real Captain Phillips in the months after his horrible ordeal, which gripped the world for five days during April 2009, culminating with his successful release on Easter Sunday of that year. But, there are really two movies here: the “shipping part”, of interest to Seatrade Global readers, and the “thriller part”, after the US Navy arrives, which could be any movie with taut suspense and authentic naval action.
Maritime enthusiasts should start with the credits at the end, Maersk Line Ltd. cooperation was noted- John Reinhart, the President and CEO of the Danish carrier’s U.S. outpost (in Norfolk, Va) was acknowledged as a source. Indeed, the website for Maersk Line Ltd. includes a link to a trailer for the movie. Crewmembers of the Maersk Alabama, including its captain, were acknowledged for their cooperation, as was the crew of the Alexander Maersk, a sister vessel, also built in Taiwan at CSBC in the late 1990’s).
I am guessing that some of the scenes, with highly authentic bridge and engine room shots, were filmed aboard the sister vessel, but that is just a guess. Locations, again discerned from the credits at the end, included Malta and Morocco as more as more mundane venues like Boston or a Midwestern US community with a high concentration of Somali immigrants.
The shipping part, which I would say comprises roughly the first half of the movie, shows a container terminal, bridge scenes, engine room scenes, including close-ups of gauges inscribed with Man B & W, and offers some good nauticalia dumbed down for landlubbers. The thriller part deviates slightly from the reality of what happened, but provides extraordinarily good drama, much aboard the ship’s lifeboat with four pirates and their bargaining chip, hostage Captain Phillips.
And, then, there are the deep inner meanings, or not. As the film opens, Phillips, played by veteran actor Tom Hanks, bemoans the world’s rush to globalisation. The pirates give lip service, briefly, to the idea that they are impoverished victims of fished out waters, but the film offers little sympathy to this view. Rather, pirates are depicted as low level muscle men in a larger criminal enterprise, organized Somali style, in business to collect ransoms, “…just business- no Al Quaeda…”.
The US “maritime security line” gets a swipe- an emergency phone call is unanswered. Instead the Brits pick up, however, the reply warns that the pirates are probably just fisherman.
There is some hint of man against the sea, reminiscent of the Winslow Homer painting of a shipwrecked Bahamian sailing into the eye of a storm, also symbolized by the small lifeboat against the big US Navy. But, ultimately, life on the sea lacks the patina of rules and law, as noted in an exchange between the hostage, Captain Phillips, and the pirate who comments that the rule of law might apply in America, with implication that life in Somali waters is as lawless and those waters are expansive.
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