Just a bunch of incomprehensible drug addicts. In which case, however you would expect that the director would shoot the film with the subjectivity of the drug-taker so that we know what’s it like to be wrapped around the nonsensical impulses of that stimulant. Maybe we are to believe that it’s because they’re all off their faces on khat. Despite the $50 million budget and a century of Hollywood, none of the Somali characters are given consistent motive or character. Instead, it is the man who was sleeping in the room earlier who emerges as the central character and apart from the fact that he sleeps on the floor of his home and has a little brother / nephew / cousin, there is no back story. The middle aged bearded pirate captain disappears from the story when his boat turns around mid-pursuit, scared off by Phillips’s ploy of radioing on a channel that he knows the pirates will pick up (they all understand English) as if speaking to a waiting crew of US fighter pilots. A central Somali character with a back story comparable to Captain Phillips’s. In a normal, standard Hollywood film here you would have had a counterpoint. We seem sure that he will have a part to play later. There is a man picked for being big and strong. He is about Hanks’s age and appears to be set up as a counterpoint to him. The man with a beard seems to have a less wild, more intelligent look to him. The men form a circle and shout at each other a lot. They offer bribes – in the form of khat of course (Somalis are all desperate drug addicts) – to be chosen: “This is a good khat. Suddenly, the people who had been so terrorised by these motiveless and shadowy milita and begging not to have to be pirates anymore are all competing desperately to be picked for the pirate crew. “We got you one last week,” says a bearded fisherman-looking bloke. The invisible people in the car shout and fire rifles in the air. A boy runs into a room and wakes up an unidentified sleeping man. People shout (there’s lots of shouting in Somalia). The camera is even shakier and grainier than before. So we leave Hanks worrying about the fading American dream and move to the heart of modernday darkness and the visualised nightmare of his nation’s insecurity. I’m not sure our son is taking school serious enough.” That kind of thing. In my day you just got your head down and you could become a ship’s captain. We will empathise with this good family guy.Īs he rides the freeway to the airport with his wife, we straight away get the anxiety in the American psyche that will become a feature of the whole film: “I just don’t know anymore, it’s going to be so hard for our kids now. It starts with Tom Hanks at home, packing his bag while Paul Greengrass’s ‘trademark’ shaky camera gives us a poignant close up of Hanks’s hand lingering over the family portrait he is going to take with him on his dangerous voyage. Even an intelligent critic like Mark Kermode in the Guardian writes optimistically (picking up on the language of the film’s official blurb quoted above) “For all its action aesthetics and nail-biting, gut-wrenching tension, this is on some level a film about globalisation, about what happens when the paths of the very poor and the very rich intersect in the crossfire of world economics.” Indeed, on ‘some level’ it is, but it is only about that on the level that the very rich in the world wish their people to view the very poor. You wouldn’t have thought it given the reviews. It wasn’t that I expected it to be great, it just turned out to be even worse than I had imagined. What we get is a boring film full of American end-of-empire angst with a not very subtle portrait of Somalis as entirely subhuman. Tom Hanks plays the captain of the title, and we are promised, “simultaneously a pulse-pounding thriller, and a complex portrait of the myriad effects of globalization”. “The true story of Captain Richard Phillips and the 2009 hijacking by Somali pirates of the US-flagged MV Maersk Alabama, the first American cargo ship to be hijacked in two hundred years”, is how it is sold. I got some free tickets this week to see Captain Phillips at the cinema.
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