Captains Courageous… or not.

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS details the real-life hijacking of the freighter ship Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates on April 8, 2009, and how its captain was taken hostage. And gaslights him into an undeserving hero.

Amongst his own officers, opinion was that the real Captain Richard Phillips was an arrogant, self-righteous prick. He was no selfless hero. So who does director Paul Greengrass cast as the cantankerous captain in this thriller? America’s sweetheart, Tom Hanks. Which tells us which way the film will skew. Because no matter what Phillips does, Hanks as Phillips will be regarded unconditionally as a good guy – even though the hijacking of his ship might have been avoided had Phillips swallowed his pride and followed anti-piracy protocols, taken the advice of superiors to be farther out to sea, and not made reckless mistakes during the hijack.

Captain Phillips did not follow orders, the ship was attacked, and he was responsible…
— Jimmy Sabga, crew, Maersk Alabama (in a lawsuit against Phillips for alleged incompetence and “willful, wanton and conscious disregard for their safety.”)

Now, being attacked is surely not the victim’s fault, however there are precautions that can be taken to minimize the potential for attack. And from all accounts, what the 53-year-old Phillips did was the maritime equivalent of walking down a dark alley wearing nothing but Daisy Duke cutoffs and clear heels. He was asking for it.

Nonetheless, CAPTAIN PHILLIPS is a gripping actioner, with compelling performances from every principal, and riveting sequences that ratchet the tension until the final moment of rescue. It’s a world and way of life that we rarely witness in cinema – The Way of the Merchant Mariner – and it’s intriguing viewing just for its immersion in maritime ethos. And there’s even some Shirtless Tom Hanks for the laydayz… It is only the casting of Mr. Hanks I have issue with, as an overarching misstep in the perception of this film’s titular character.

Also, how can a movie based on Phillips’s own 2010 book (A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea, co-writer Stephan Talty) be as objective as it should be? Any wonder his crew is livid at how he’s portrayed, with screenwriter Billy Ray seemingly taking Phillips at his word on how blameless he is (and hot! – Shirtless Tom Hanks!).

Early scenes show Phillips arriving at the port of Salalah in Oman (just north of Yemen), taking command of the Maersk and its cargo of containers, and outlining his course through the Gulf of Aden, then down the East African coast, past Somalia to Mombasa, Kenya.

We see Phillips getting snippy with his crew, ending their coffee break early, ordering them to keep the “pirate cages” locked, and running them through drills they don’t want to do. We also see him read an email warning of pirate attacks, which he disregards, and minimizes the danger to his wife back home (Catherine Keener). It’s a screenplay ploy at creating a dramatic arc for Phillips to overcome, and it’s meant to offset Hanks’ inbuilt niceness, but it’s a nothing burger, as the pirates attack almost immediately, and these unsavory character traits of Phillips are quickly forgotten, as the whole crew rallies around their captain.

Before the attack, the Somali pirates are humanized, which is commendable, as we see they are plundering ships to pay off a tyrannical warlord. And these impoverished young lads are raised in an environment where hijacking ships IS their “job.” This is what the failed state of Somalia spawns – risking their lives going up against monolith American cargo ships, these boys are not terrorists laboring under an ideology; they’re simply trying to survive. (I’m pretty sure this point of view is not examined in Phillips’ ghost-written book.)

None of the four starring Somali actors have ever acted before and give inspired naturalistic performances. Their leader is Muse (Barkhad Abdi); there’s the Hothead (Faysal Ahmed), the Driver (Mahat M. Ali) and the Kid (Barkhad Abdirahman). (In reality, all the pirates were between 17 and 19, but besides The Kid, these actors look between 20 and 25.) The Kid forms a bond with Phillips for showing him kindness in tending his injured foot. Driver drives the lifeboat. And I’m surprised Hothead doesn’t bash Phillips more often, with the amount of fumes comin’ out the top of his head. And Barkhad Abdi just explodes outa the gate as “The Captain”…

One hell of an actor, Abdi oozes quiet, laconic menace, his glare showing little patience for these bristling boys around him; he wants to get this job done for his survival. When he takes the bridge of the Maersk, his first words to Hanks as Phillips are ad-lib: “Look at me. Look at me! I’M the captain now!” So when Hanks hedges his lines indecisively, it’s because he really was caught off-guard. And Abdi’s lines remain in the film because they are thunderheads, spoken with a conviction so menacing that Tom must’ve leaked a little.

Like a mouse attacking an elephant – and winning.

What is most alarming is the inadequacy of the freighter ships in defending themselves with such expensive cargo onboard. If we wonder how pirates in a small skiff can actually capture a gargantuan container ship with skyscraper sides, it becomes obvious when we see the piffling methods Phillips adopts to deter them: giant hoses lining the perimeter of the ship spraying powerful water jets outwards; zigzagging to create a massive wake to flounder the skiff; the ruse of making a public radio call to an imaginary warship (that the pirates can pick up), and answering himself in a disguised voice that the warship is on its way; pirate cages which are basic barred doors that can be easily opened by shooting the locks off; down to shooting puny flares at the skiff… While the pirates… have GUNS.

It is jaw-dropping that these open water American vessels are completely unarmed, even though they face the daily threat of pirates, yet every second douchebag in America has a firearm on his hips, to ward off their biggest threat of a Karen in the parking lot.

While Muse searches the ship for booty, the Maersk crew (very naturalistically portrayed by Michael Chernus, Corey Johnson, Chris Mulkey as senior officers) manage to capture him, and Hothead grabs Phillips. The crew offer a trade – Muse for Phillips, even offering the pirates their lifeboat as escape.

Now this is where Reel Life gets tricky over Real Life. The film portrays Phillips volunteering to board the lifeboat, because “I gotta get them off this ship!” He shows Driver the controls, intending to exit as soon as Muse is aboard, but as soon as Muse enters the lifeboat, Hothead conks Phillips in the kidneys to kidnap him. The real-life crew of the Maersk are very touchy about this portrayal, citing that Phillips was always a hostage; that he never “voluntarily” entered the lifeboat, he was dragged in as a prisoner.

We vowed we were going to take it to our grave. We weren’t going to say anything, and then we hear this PR stuff coming out about him giving himself up, and he’s still hostage. The whole crew’s like, ‘What!?’ Everybody’s in shock.
— Mike Perry, Chief Engineer, Maersk Alabama, on CNN.

Lifeboat technology has come a long way since the rubber raft and people eating each other.

THE LIFEBOAT isn’t one of those inflatable rafts open to the elements — it’s a durable piece of hardware that looks like a cross between an orange boot and a spaceship; seating for 10, a bed, medical supplies, water, an engine and steering – it’s a regular little haven; makes abandoning ship feel almost luxurious. And the Maersk follows the pirates, mistreating Phillips all the way, in this little boot.

Then the SEALs arrive. When that giant warship rolls up on them with its claxons blaring, there is something magnificently American Big Dick about it. But wait—This is the USS Bainbridge “assigned to Counter-Piracy Task Force 151” – so this is the weapon! But it seems to be only a reactionary weapon, not a deterrent. Because pirates would obviously attack cargo ships nowhere near this warship. So what’s the point of it? We thank Almighty Industrial-Military Jesus for its presence, but it’s just another American Big Dick sailing around international waters, that the wanking U.S. Gubmint pretends is curbing piracy because they named it that.

Onboard the lifeboat, Phillips tries to reason with Muse: “There’s gotta be something more than being a fisherman and kidnapping people.” Comes the tragic reply: “Maybe in America, maybe in America…” No one from a First World country will feel the visceral desperation of having no other options in these underprivileged countries. Movie does a good job trying to make it as real as possible through Abdi’s heartbreaking performance. Phillips: “They’re not gonna let you get me back to Somalia – they would rather sink this boat.” And Muse replies, “I’ve come too far. I can’t go back.”

Muse would eventually be coaxed onto the warship for medical help (the Maersk crew had cut his hand badly in the captain exchange), and sharpshooters would take out the three other boys, in a tense, grand display of movie propaganda that keeps other countries fearing American military might. You think we’ll ever hear the real story from these covert ops thicknecks? Even local police falsify every report they write to make themselves look lawful; imagine how far into fantasy the top secret classified American Military reports go, in matters of murder in international waters, to make them look ethical and morally high ground and Geneva Convention.

After being held on the lifeboat almost five days, Phillips was rescued on April 12, 2009.

When Phillips is taken onboard the warship, Hanks gives an astounding rendition of trauma, as the ship’s medic tries to examine him, and he is completely checked out. He fades in and out, he cries, he stops crying; he can’t identify objects, can’t hear, he answers a random question, and his eyes check out again… Moments like these prove why Hanks is one of the greatest actors in the world. And we circle back around to the reason why they chose him for this strenuous lift in making a bad guy look like a good guy.

It may seem like I’m ragging on Phillips, but to make a hero comparison, Hanks himself would play another real life captain in 2016’s SULLY – the tale of Captain Chesley Sullenberger landing a crippled aircraft on the Hudson River – and no subversive reports would surface about Sullenberger, because he truly was the hero that Hanks portrayed onscreen. But with Phillips, it seems that for every person calling him a hero, there’s someone aching to “tell the truth” about why he’s not.

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS draws us into its world completely, by shooting onboard the Maersk Alabama’s sister ship (called, strangely enough, the Alabama Maersk), so the authenticity is irreproachable – exact surroundings, no set dressing or CGI, everything tangibly real. Same goes for the warship – a real life American Big Dick, populated by real cavemen—I mean, crewmen. All followed by director Greengrass’s hand-held non-intrusive steadi-shaki-cams.

Final title cards tell us Abduwali Muse was convicted of piracy and is serving a 33-year sentence in Indiana. We can’t help but feel sorry for him, knowing his poverty-stricken, violence-bred background. And Captain Phillips went back to sea a year later. Was he a better man for the experience? His crew tell us no. But a book and a movie tell us he’s a hero. And who are we to question American Big Dick?

END

Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Idiocy.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
— Carl Sagan.

Someone’s been reading Whitley Strieber’s Communion. And believing it.

There are two kinds of hoaxes. The First Kind catches the public off guard with its ersatz authenticity (Piltdown Man, Orson Welles’s broadcast of War Of The Worlds, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT); the Second Kind requires but a minimal amount of rational thought to dispel its idiotic fakery. Olatunde Osunsanmi‘s film THE FOURTH KIND – is the Second Kind.

Full marks to Osunsanmi for getting it done, though: it’s hard work in Hollywood moving any project from conception to completion and he not only scored funding for his outdated, tired concept of extraterrestrial alien abduction, but also A-List stars to pretend to be abducted. He goes to great pains to stamp it with authenticity: names bleeped out, faces blurred, filmstock doctored to look like vidcam footage, bad angles – and then makes one fatal mistake…

He tells us it’s a movie. His lead characters tell us they are acting in a movie version of real events. Say wha–? Ironically, Osunsanmi thinks this pre-empting of our skepticism will make his fiction The First Kind. Instead, he shoots himself in the anal probe.

THE FOURTH KIND starts annoying us from its first frames, as Milla Jovovich walks toward the camera way too seriously for anyone with her do-me eyelashes and starts talking directly to the audience, telling us she will be portraying Dr. Abigail Tyler, while a title card appears, alerting us: “Milla Jovovich (actor).” To add to the irritation, it looks like an MTV VJ monologue.

Firstly, Jovo, you’re way too pretty to be Abigail Tyler (whom we see in “real footage” looking like a bloodless zombie), which raises another problem, in two parts:

1) you’re too sexy for me to care about paranormal events;
2) you’re too sexy for me to take you seriously.

Close Encounters of The Kind Cuke

When Will Patton appears in a sheriff’s car, we take it for granted he’s the sheriff in this movie – until Osunsanmi blows our contact-high with the title card: “Will Patton as Sheriff August.” In any film – even bad ones – our suspension of disbelief at least concedes that the actors ARE the people they’re playing, but if we keep getting told they’re actors, how do we invest our emotions in them? When Abigail (Milla Jovovich, actor) is hysterical over her daughter being kidnapped, after maintaining throughout the movie that she is just acting, now you want us to be concerned that she’s ‘acting’ hysterical? You can’t have it both ways, Osunsanmi!

One glance at the credits will reveal “The Real Dr. Abbey Tyler” is played by bedraggled Charlotte Milchard. (Yes, an actor too!) She appears in leached footage telling an interviewer (director Olatunde Osunsanmi – playing an interviewer named Olatunde Osunsanmi!) about her hypnosis experiments on residents of Nome, Alaska, and how those rednecks having seizures on her couch “proved” they were abducted by space aliens. She’s got the video to prove it. No, not video of them being abducted – video of them having seizures.

Royt…

The concept is ripped directly from Whitley Strieber’s 1987 book Communion – an autobiographical account of the author “remembering” being abducted by extra-terrestrials when he was put under hypnosis. When I was a kid, that book terrified me for its portrayal of otherworldly things that I, as a young person, could never hope to understand or experience; now, it’s not the book that terrifies me – it’s the adults who believe it’s true.

Split-screen during hypnosis sessions, showing ‘actors’ on one side and ‘real’ footage on the other, with ‘actual audio’ of Abigail Tyler. Which raises the most obvious issue: If they’ve got the REAL FOOTAGE, why bother with reenactments? What could be more disturbing, more authentic than the real thing?

Of course, even the ‘real’ footage is created by Osunsanmi, with its audio dialogue matching the actors’ dialogue in the ‘reenactment’ footage word for word – a perfect feedback loop of prosthetic-limb-sniffing stupidity.

If Osunsanmi wanted to scare youngsters and ET abduction knuckleheads, why couldn’t he simply tell us he’s showing as much actual footage that exists and then providing dramatizations also?

Abigail’s husband was killed mysteriously; apparently stabbed on their lover’s bed by an alien, no clues left behind. We later find out that he committed suicide, which is plausible for two reasons:

1) it explains why she was never arrested as a prime suspect in his murder;
2) he was married to HER.

Will Patton as Sheriff August even shows Abigail (Mila Jovovich, actor) photo evidence of the suicide and she refuses to believe it. Interviewer (Olatunde Osunsanmi, actor) asks The Real Dr. Abigail Tyler (Charlotte Milchard, actor, playing The Real Dr. Abigail Tyler), “How do you expect me or the audience to respect your credibility over anything else you’ve said?” She answers, “They weren’t hallucinations. It’s hard to face the truth.” How very Christian of her: even in the face of evidence, believe the fantasy. It’s almost like she’s an actor in a movie pretending that something is real when it’s not.

When one of Abigail’s patients (who suffers an inordinately violent seizure on her couch – and therefore must have been abducted real good) goes home and shoots his family (in more ‘real’ footage split-screened with asinine dramatizations), only Will Patton as Sheriff August dares to ask the pertinent question, “Without hypnosis, would he have killed his family?” Because if you truly believed the bullshit art of hypnosis is real, then it follows that human behavior could be adversely affected by it, which means you are admitting to being at least partly responsible for murder. But the fact that Abigail continues to remain free of custody means that no one is taking her little vocation or her claims seriously.

This raises ANOTHER question: if the city of Nome has established that Abigail’s husband suicided, it means they consider her extraterrestrial claims bogus, which means they are allowing a known delusional hypnotherapist to continue practicing in their town, and are derelict in their duties to protect the populace. Who is regulating these “doctors” – actors?!

Actor Elias Koteas plays Abel Campos, Abbey’s confidante and resident skeptic. Every ET abduction tale has a resident skeptic (like a gay beard or something) to allow ET lunkheads to pretend they really are considering the scientific side of abduction theories. But these skeptics are about as dedicated as gay chicks in Hollywood movies that go hetero at the drop of a trou.

Abigail plays us recordings of aliens speaking through her under hypnosis, in a dead Sumerian tongue. They say things like, “I am god,” “I am father,” “I am savior,” trying to hitch their wagon to Erich von Däniken’s Ancient Astronaut theories. So I guess if you speak with a basso intonation in a foreign language – you must have direct contact with extra-terrestrials! Now we’re at a level of stupidity that would make von Däniken proud.

…all of the “evidence” that a lot of people are willing to accept as “proof” of such phenomena is pure garbage. And 1 million pieces of garbage don’t add up to “evidence.” They just add up to a pile of garbage a million pieces high.
— blog comment, RationalResponder.

Redneck voiceover testimonials close the movie: “I saw somethin’ flyin’ with 20 red lights on it.” Well, that IS the technical definition of an Unidentified Flying Object. And guess what? YOU don’t have the authority to identify it. It’s being done on a military level far above your pay grade and small mind. Sighting that UFO didn’t prove how vast the universe is with its extraterrestrial technologies, it proves how insignificant YOU are when it comes to terrestrial technology.

I wish I was abducted while I watched this movie. Would’ve saved me two hours of my life, with the added bonus of being anal probed.

END