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Captain Phillips quick review (1 Viewer)

RobertR

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Robert Crawford said:
I don't care about what really happened, I care about being entertained which this film did for me. These films about real events should always be taken with a grain of salt as I usually do more research for the real facts after viewing the film.
The problem is that there are going to be many, many people who will see the movie and think "yes, that's how it really was" without ever bothering to question or research the matter. In that sense, the movie does a disservice.
I also look at news stories lie one linked with a skeptical eye. After all the people in the news story have 50 million reasons to tell "their" side of the story.
Their side of the story is supported by the fact that the captain and Maersk (and every other ship sailing around the Horn of Africa) were warned repeatedly by the U.S. Maritime Administration to stay at least 600 miles from the Somali coast. The problem with pirates was well known, and the captain ignored it (the ship was well within the 600 mile limit when attacked).
 

TravisR

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RobertR said:
The problem is that there are going to be many, many people who will see the movie and think "yes, that's how it really was" without ever bothering to question or research the matter. In that sense, the movie does a disservice.
You're probably right but it's not the movie's fault if anyone is dumb enough to think that "Based on a true story" means "This is exactly how it happened".
 

Robert Crawford

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RobertR said:
The problem is that there are going to be many, many people who will see the movie and think "yes, that's how it really was" without ever bothering to question or research the matter. In that sense, the movie does a disservice.
So? I don't care about what others think about that incident. We have all grown up watching films that were not historically accurate and some of them about incidents much larger than this piracy incident.
 

Robert Crawford

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TravisR said:
You're probably right but it's not the movie's fault if anyone is dumb enough to think that "Based on a true story" means "This is exactly how it happened".
You got that right. If you get your history lesson from a film then you're just lazy especially with the means available today to research any topic.
 

Chuck Mayer

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I agree with Crawdaddy. Who to trust, who to trust? The guy selling his book and personal story, or the members of his crew suing the company for the aforementioned 50M. I assume the truth lies somewhere between, and none of those parties probably even knows it anymore. I saw Captain Phillips for the filmmaking, the great performances, and the tension and drama. And those were all exceptional. I'm under no illusions about the veracity of the film, but neither do I cleanly believe the detractors either.
 

TravisR

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Colin Jacobson said:
Don't know what to believe, but I'll avoid the theatrical screening to be safe!
I meant to chime in on this earlier but if your stomach is anything like mine, avoid the theater. By the end of the movie, I was in worse shape than Tom Hanks.

EDIT: It's a very exciting movie and Hanks is Oscar-level excellent. Definitely worth seeing, just do it on a TV.
 

Colin Jacobson

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TravisR said:
I meant to chime in on this earlier but if your stomach is anything like mine, avoid the theater. By the end of the movie, I was in worse shape than Tom Hanks.

EDIT: It's a very exciting movie and Hanks is Oscar-level excellent. Definitely worth seeing, just do it on a TV.
Thanks! I've never borrowed your stomach, so I don't know how we compare, but I do know that Greengrass messed me up twice - I'm not likely to see another one of his flicks on the big screen unless it's sponsored by a tripod company! :lol:
 

Mark Booth

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I saw 'Captain Phillips' on opening night and loved every minute of it. Best movie of 2013 (so far)!

First and foremost, I expect a movie to entertain me. I couldn't care less which parts are real and which parts are dramatic license. Anyone that is blacklisting this movie because they believe the crews' side of the "real" story needs to wake up. The crew is after money and that's the bottom line. The crew wouldn't have said squat if they'd already received the settlements they seek. They are using the publicity around the movie to create a negative publicity to hurt the studio and the movie's chances with audiences. If you fall for that, I feel sorry for you because this is one HELL of a good movie!

Anyway, the reason I dug up this topic….
The cooperation of the United States Navy played a huge role in the successful filming of 'Captain Phillips'. I've just finished watching a video (linked below) titled "Captain Phillips - The Role of the United States Navy". The video is 1 hour 15 minutes long. The first part of the video is a little bit dry, but it really picks up about 20 minutes in. The video ends with my favorite guest speaker of all,
the actual Navy Corpsman that played opposite Tom Hanks in the final, VERY emotional scene in the movie.

Before watching the video, I was not aware of just how few professional actors were used in the making of this movie. Real Navy personnel (active and retired) filled many roles,
including the Seals that eventually ended the hostage situation.

Watching the video gave me an even greater appreciation for this wonderful movie! Of particular note is the repeated mentions of just how faithful the movie is to actual events (from Navy personnels' perspective). Yes, there are mentions of dramatic license taken (certain scenes compressed or expanded in time, etc.) but the guest speakers in this video all confirm there is definitely a strong level of realism to the movie.

This video contains many spoilers. If you intimately followed the real event and know or remember every detail, then there's not a whole lot to be spoiled, with the large exception of
how the movie ends with Hanks and the two Corpsman in the sick bay.
If you don't know or remember anything about the 'Captain Phillips' story, then I recommend you watch the movie BEFORE you watch this video.

Like I said, the video gets a bit of a dry start. But I was thoroughly engrossed from about the 20 minute mark through the rest of the video!

Captain Phillips: Story Behind the Story - YouTube


In the video, it's pointed out that, prior to the taking of the Maersk Alabama, no pirate crew had ever successfully boarded a ship like the Alabama due to speed and freeboard height of the ship. Also, the commanding officer of the USS Bainbridge makes a somewhat disparaging remark about the real Maersk Alabama's crew. Even way back then, I think the crew was only concerned about "what's in it for me".

Mark
 

Kevin EK

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I don't have an issue with movies being based on real events when you have various storytelling choices being made that may diverge from the reality. The audience is not looking for a documentary or a play-by-play re-enactment. They're just looking for a good story, well told.

That said, I do prefer for movies based on historical events to at least try to find their drama and conflict within the reality of what occurred, rather than inventing false conflicts that did not exist. SPOILERS: For example, the end of Argo has the dramatic chase across the tarmac that really ramps up the tension as we wonder if the good guys are going to get out. Which is fine and good, but it's a wild over exaggeration of what actually occurred. I would have been fine to not have that in the movie, since the actual departure of the embassy personnel didn't happen that way. (In reality, they just went through the airport after all that prep for worst case scenario, and it ironically wasn't a big deal.) In other movies, there are problems where the filmmaker is interpreting the real events exactly in reverse of what actually occurred. For example, Frost/Nixon completely misunderstands the dynamic of what happened during the David Frost Nixon interviews, and mischaracterizes the key statement made by Nixon during them. (And that's not even getting into a fantasy scene where Nixon inexplicably calls Frost the night before the best part of the interviews.) In cases like that, I tend to prefer that the filmmakers just make the movie a completely fictional exercise.

But with Captain Phillips, I honestly didn't find the movie to be a complete reversal of the true events, nor did I find anything jarring beyond the camera work.
I should note that I saw the movie at a screening at Sony where the seating was completely level - so you could see all of our heads bobbing and weaving to read the subtitles throughout. I thought the performances were all good, particularly the young man playing the lead pirate in the attack. As for Hanks' accent, I noticed it coming through very strongly in the early moments with his wife and in the earliest scenes on the freighter. But as the movie continued on, the accent became a lot less noticeable for me. It's not really a big thing - and frankly, I think he could have layed off on the heavy accent in the early scenes, but it's the kind of thing I tend to pick up on if it's presented prominently in the early going.
 

Michael Elliott

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I finally got around to watching this one yesterday. *** 1/2 from me. Certainly Hanks best work in years and I thought the film really stood apart from many others like it because of the character development it allowed not only to Hanks but mainly the bad guys. The action scenes were perfectly handled and there's no question that it was pretty tense from start to finish.

The whole "that's not how it happened" has never bothered me because common sense would tell you it was probably a boring conversation inside that lifeboat. A little spice or pulling the good part together for entertainment is needed. With that said, if how Hanks got in the lifeboat was true then they should have just shot him there. I couldn't believe these people could have been that stupid to think he was going to just get in there and they'd let him go. I really, really hope this is something fake for the movie.

As for A HIJACKING did this thing get pulled out of theaters by Columbia? The local arthouse theater advertised this movie for months and kept promising that it was "coming soon" but all word of it just disappeared. I wonder if Columbia had some sort of deal to get it out of theaters (not that it would have taken business away from this)? Either way, it's on Netflix streaming so I'm going to try and watch it soon.
 

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