DVD: Captain Phillips

The primary DVD extra with Captain Phillips is an hour-long behind-the-scenes featurette. Most heavyweight Hollywood films have these but they’re often backslap-fests with little true revelation. The Captain Phillips featurette bucks the trend with genuine insight into the film-making methods of Paul Greengrass.

Captain Phillips is classic Greengrass, close in flavour to his shockingly powerful United 93. He combines earnest attention-to-detail coverage of the minutiae of extreme situations with a fat-free forward-driving narrative and enough glimpses of real humanity to keep the emotions gripped. The film follows the true story of the eponymous Phillips, played by Tom Hanks, a US Merchant Navy captain whose container ship, the Maersk Alabama, is hijacked by Somali pirates as it heads for Mombasa.

The documentary reveals that Hanks and the crew of the Maersk Alabama were not allowed to meet the actors playing the pirates until they boarded the ship’s bridge. The result is superbly tense, but the film has the viewer hooked long before that. As well as dwelling on the back story of the pirates, led by thethoroughly believable Barkhad Abdi, it shows the full saga of their tiny little skiff, manned by four people chasing a giant ship full of multiple crew. Greengrass captures the true vulnerability of the unarmed seamen facing such an assault.

The latter half follows Phillips’ fortunes as things take a spectacular turn for the worse. Greengrass never lets things drift off into excess or bombast. His final scene is a masterful and moving counterpoint to the usual action flick trick of running the credits the moment the story has peaked. His care to get his facts correct and film in a real ocean environment pay off, giving us a film that drives along but maintains an earthy realism that his two leads – Hanks’s calm everyman decency and Abdi’s conflicted pragmatism – inhabit with depth and believability.

Overleaf: Watch the trailer for Captain Phillips