If you want to watch a ship pursued by pirate speedboats, or crewmen dodging shots being fired by the intruders – and that’s all you want to watch – then by all means add a star to that rating. That chase across the ocean, with the ship weaving this way and that to try and shake off the pirates, is a notably exciting sequence – but if director Paul Greengrass merely wanted to make an action flick, then he should’ve made another Bourne sequel (he directed the second and third films in that franchise). There are subtler aspects in Captain Phillips, which this embarrassingly tone-deaf drama misunderstands or ignores. In a world where almost everything is deemed ‘offensive’ by some group or other, the near-unanimous acclaim for this very dodgy movie is bewildering.
The story is simple (and true), telling of an incident in 2009 when the American cargo ship ‘Maersk Alabama’ was hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia (note that much of the important dialogue is in Somali, with Greek subtitles). It’s a popular premise – a Danish film called A Hijacking has also been winning acclaim this year – and part of the attraction comes from the imbalance between predator and prey. You can see it literally in the image of the massive ship, big as a block of flats, menaced by the small, speedy boats, like an elephant attacked by gnats – which of course is also an image of the grand, powerful West being attacked by scruffy Third World malcontents. Like 9/11 (also the subject of a Greengrass film, United 93), gangs of Somali pirates capture the imagination as something weak and backward that nonetheless threatens our comfort and security. They’re both to be feared and pitied.
The film has to walk a fine line – but doesn’t have the delicacy even to see it, much less walk it. You end up feeling sorry for the pirates, but not in a way that’s intended. The main battle of wills is between Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks) of the ‘Maersk Alabama’ and Muse (Barkhad Abdi), the chief pirate. A connection is drawn between the men: “You gotta be tough to survive out there,” says Phillips early on, and Muse says something very similar in a later scene (“It’s not a game for the weak”). Yet in fact the battle of wills is frustratingly one-sided. Phillips never wavers, never puts a foot wrong, never cries or pleads for his life. His crew behave impeccably, even the union man who grumbles that he didn’t sign on to fight pirates. Muse, on the other hand, can barely control his band of khat-smoking junkies – and keeps getting tricked by the Westerners, even (or especially) after they say “I’m not trying to trick you”.
This makes a difference. A classic like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (the 70s original, not the feeble 00s remake) corrected the power imbalance by making the intruders super-competent. The hijackers in that film were professionals, while the city of New York was dysfunctional – which is why their inevitable defeat was so entertaining. Here, on the other hand, the Establishment (both Captain Phillips and the soldiers called in to help him) is efficient and sympathetic while the Somalis, despite their protestations – “No al-Qaeda here! Just business!” – are a demonised Other from beginning to end.
Literally the first image we see of Somalia is of men with guns. One of the pirates is nastier, one is “just a kid”, but mostly they’re indistinguishable (in an unfortunate irony, the actor playing Muse has almost the same name as the actor playing one of his cohorts, Barkhad Abdi and Barkhad Abdirahman). The climax comes close to being offensive, with the US Navy aiming its guns at the pirates and just waiting for them to show themselves so it can shoot them dead. There’s no ‘Is it right to execute people?’, not even ‘What a shame these poor Africans have to die, when all they wanted was to make some money’ – just a case of ‘When will these upstarts put their heads in our crosshairs, so they can receive their just punishment?’.
To be fair, there are token efforts to humanise and complicate. Muse and his friends are themselves in thrall to Somali crime lords, their lives on the line as much as Phillips’s. It’s mentioned (briefly) that over-fishing by Western companies is a big reason why they had to stop being fishermen and become pirates. Yet the thrust of the film is against that kind of balance. “I’m the Captain now!” says Muse, but there’s no suggestion of equality – if anything he’s mocked for his presumption, Phillips and the soldiers repeatedly calling him ‘Captain’ in the tone you use to humour a child into eating his spinach.
There seems to be a basic disjunction in US pop-culture at the moment: America sees itself as threatened and vulnerable, when in fact it’s the strongest country in the world. The same problem cropped up in Zero Dark Thirty, another mystifyingly over-praised film that focused on the hunt for Osama bin Laden without ever worrying that he might’ve been turned into a bogeyman for political reasons; clearly, a decade of post-9/11 fear and loathing has taken its toll. If you want to see hopeless, shambolic Africans tricked, deceived, outsmarted and finally punished by heroic white men equipped with state-of-the-art technology, then by all means watch Captain Phillips. Otherwise, I think the star rating is about right.
DIRECTED BY Paul Greengrass
STARRING Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi, Barkhad Abdirahman
US 2013 134 mins