Captain Phillips

Posted on October 28, 2013 by Tennyson

There are only two a few movies which delivers almost in the same manner as the critics say; and we have had two in the gap on one month, which were Rush and Gravity; to that list, here comes Captain Phillips. It is easy to brand a movie as bad and the flick can easily live up-to that bad reputation; but when the critics say a movie is exceptional, there are only a few movies which actually prove them right for the common audience, and Captain Phillips is such a movie. There are so many movies branded as bad by the critics which were actually either good or bad, and there were others which were somehow branded good; but when we talk about this movie along with the other two I mentioned earlier, there would be a uniformity in this branding, and they are exceptional, no matter how we look at them; and who looks at them from which angle and on which day. Welcome to the thirty days of awesomeness from Hollywood, with the exception of Runner Runner – this was a month which started with the first two movies rating 57/200 together, and the last two rated 177/200; it is a strange month indeed!

Our first idea was to leave this movie behind, but that had to change. It was not just the reviews that did it, as it was more about the brilliance of Rush which we had earlier ignored brought to me. It almost completely took away the need to watch a movie which worked on familiar or more interesting background. So this is more of a biopic of Captain Richard Phillips, who was taken hostage by Somalian pirates in the Indian Ocean in 2009; we used to wonder – how is it going to work out? We had already watched a Tamil movie in the form of Maryan which had a hostage situation involving armed men from Sudan. Even as it turned out to be good, there were lot of things lacking in there as it scored just with the visuals, music and the right cast. It had stuck to the love theme in quite an unrealistic manner, and there it lost the footing a bit. Here we have another situation, and here we have Tom Hanks, along with the most realistic portrayal which is more focused on one thing rather than too many unnecessary exaggerated things which were praised to the heavens in the form of love and a lot like the same.

Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) is the captain of MV Maersk Alabama in its journey from Oman to Kenya. There is the high chance of being attacked by pirates of Somalia, and they take enough precautions, even keeping two groups of pirates away as they use deception of an airstrike arriving and also the waves of the ship itself to keep the groups away. The first group gets frightened and the second gets the boat’s engine out of order. One of the two groups of pirates return on the next day led by Abduwali Muse (Barkhad Abdi) in a faster boat, carrying a quickly prepared ladder. In spite of the valiant efforts of the crew with pumps and waves, they get on board with the rusty ladder, after taking advantage of a faulty pump, capturing the captain and two others while the rest of the crew keeps themselves safe in the ship’s engine room. Muse hopes to keep the ship for asking for insurance money from the shipping company, and in case of a failure he has to answer to his bosses. About fourty or fourty five minutes into the movie, the ship has already been captured by the pirates.

As the crew capture the pirate leader, they are able to get the pirates into the ship’s lifeboat, but they manage to take Phillips with them as they go into the water in hope for getting some ransom money for the captain. The second half of the movie is about the life in that one orange boat and the efforts of the navy to get the captain back. The ship keeps following the lifeboat until the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Bainbridge arrives, followed by two other ships of combat. The pirates also lose contact with their mother boat and decides to go all the way to Somalia which the U.S. Navy ships can’t allow. As the pirates know that they have come too far to quit right now, the navy is ordered not to let them get to the land at any cost. Phillips’ efforts to reason with the pirates is in vain and so is his effort to swim away from them to one of the ships. They ask for money in millions for which the navy asks for time. Meanwhile, the SEAL shooters are trying to get shots to take down the pirates. The hostage situation gets worse as the pirates gets impatient and restless. The question would be about how they take care of the situation keeping the hostage alive and how the captain himself manages to keep him alive and in his senses.

As you might have already guessed, this is the movie of Tom Hanks. He depicts his character with such sincerity which is rarely seen on screen. I have known him for Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Appollo 13, Catch Me If You Can, Saving Private Ryan and The Terminal, but from now on-wards I shall know him first for this movie than any other. Yes, there are many other movies of class, but this is the one for now, to be discussed a lot and to be thought about a lot along with all that admiration which it gained with the claps in the theatre, even as it was not that loud as what Rush has managed even with a lesser audience. Tom Hanks is Richard Phillips, a man in charge of a ship and the captain who is taken as a hostage in a lifeboat, beaten up and almost killed by the pirates. There is no doubt left in the mind of the viewers about that. He lives through that experience rather than act with the tide. The portrayal of the leading character is worth the applause as he is a common man, an average person who does nothing heroic to be exact, just what is necessary and what was indeed the right thing. He doesn’t create a spectacle, but lives through that perfectly.

Even as we would never come to know the exact events of the Maersk Alabama hijacking and the Richard Phillips hostage crisis of 2009, the film’s version shall stand as the version that we know. It might not be perfect or close enough that perfection which one can imagine while watching such a movie inspired by true events. The movie has to be applauded for how much it has kept close to a realistic depiction of a ship hijacking and a hostage crisis though, without any exaggeration or stuff for the fans. In spite of the same, the movie is still thrilling, something I had my doubts about. The movie does have the moments of slowing down and repetitions, which can’t be denied, but those moments are very less. The climax scene is really good, and Tom Hanks as well as the actors who played the pirates go through that tense situation very well. The movie does put a strong value on the lives of one human, and places it as the central point. One would be left to wonder how many governments of the world would value the lives of their citizens this much. By the end, the humanity shall turn out victorious as most us already know from what we read from the internet.

Taking the action back from the thrilling climax, I would say that the moments in the ship was the best. What came between the time from the arrival of the SEALs and the negotiation with the pirate leader was a bit of slow and slightly dragging – still not something worth putting the blame on. Here we also have the realistic depiction of piracy, and it is a good reminder to those pirate loving fans of Pirates of the Carribean fans. There is no Captain Jack Sparrow when talking about it, and its time one stops heavily romanticizing vampires, werewolves and pirates just because some books or movies had such depictions. But the movie doesn’t fail to bring out how much of a situation the pirates are caught within, between their bosses and the risk of being murdered or caught by the armed forces. Piracy might remain a cause of concern for a long time, and this movie takes a realistic look into it, asserting the need to get rid of it. One last word would be about Barkhad Abdi who played the pirate leader Abduwali Muse – a great effort indeed; smart, intense and still funny at times; saying that he loves America and wants to live there for the rest of his life. This one is surely a strong contender for some Academy awards next year – along with Gravity and Rush.

Release date: 11th October 2013
Running time: 134 minutes
Directed by: Paul Greengrass
Starring: Tom Hanks, Catherine Keener, Barkhad Abdi, Barkhad Abdirahman, Faysal Ahmed, Mahat M. Ali, Michael Chernus, David Warshofsky, Corey Johnson, Chris Mulkey, Yul Vazquez, Max Martini, Omar Berdouni, Mohamed Ali, Issak Farah Samatar

@ Cemetery Watch
✠The Vampire Bat.

Pacific Rim

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Tennyson

The fictional stories concerning the aliens from outer-space have always been with us through those books, movies, cartoons and comics right from the childhood. Alien, Predator and Event Horizon were among the best feeders of outer-space horror. It was just a few weeks ago, that the audience accepted the friendly neighborhood alien in Man of Steel, and the same space travel thing was explored thrice in the last few months, with Star Trek: Into Darkness, Oblivion and the weaker of the group, After Earth. Well, this time, from the depths of abyss comes the alien creatures, not from the sky, but from underneath the oceans to the above world. The first choice of looking for alien life form was always beyond the stars, which is actually quite surprising. For the common man, it should not have been so, but unfortunately they have been loaded with ideas of life on other planets by science even as the fact remains that they have never seen any of these planets or stars in the way they are taught in the school. I would have preferred not to study the same and choose only art and literature, but unfortunately, education is clearly biased towards science. What this study of science does is that it unintentionally makes religion the more believable thing around for the intellectuals of the highest class. It is on a blind faith of technology and scientific extremism that the concept of space aliens are based on, and it is this same thing that Guillermo del Toro has annihilated here; not that it was not done before, but this time, it is in the form an incredibly powerful spectacle.

Del Toro’s work has always come up with beauty in horror, and this movie is no exception. The movie plunges into the depths of the theme of alien invasion and comes up with that pure awesomeness which The Avengers missed by some distance and Transformers: Dark of the Moon missed by quite a million light years. This is what Transformers should have been, but unfortunately that series lost all the good things with the second and third parts of the movie. Pacific Rim shows how a fighting machine should be. From the man who gave us Pan’s Labyrinth, at least this much was expected, and he has delivered it, with fantastic power which would make this the movie of the year so far, and may be even the best science fiction action move in two years. I didn’t really free myself from his Hellboy II: The Golden Army when I went to see this one, thanks to the television channels; and not to forget Blade II. There is one warning though, as this is not recommended for the movie cynics – they are the kind of people who will dislike this movie and come up with weird unimaginative reasons which are less significant than the smallest robot’s toe. If this movie can’t leave a smile on your face by the end, there is no doubt that such people belong to the Kaiju group, as the monster sympathizing kids who can’t bear to see their little dinosaur things losing to robots.

The movie takes the viewers to the future, when the planet is under attack by Kaiju, a name they call for the gigantic monsters continuously emerging from a portal beneath the ocean. After a number of attacks and destruction, the humans understand that it is not going to stop. To combat these big monsters, all the nations unite and use all their remaining resources to create the giant robots called Jaegers, each controlled by two (or more) pilots whose minds are joined by a neural bridge, as it would be too huge for two of them. But,The plot follows Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), a former Jaeger pilot who had lost both his machine and his brother while fighting. He is called out of retirement by Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) and is teamed with a rookie Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) in a last effort to defeat the monsters. At a time when Jaeger program is being decommissioned, and walls are built to protect the cities from the monsters, there is chance for one final attempt on closing the portal and saving the world with only four last robots remaining. As the monsters continue to evolve and adapt to the methods chosen by humans, the survival of both the man and the machine was becoming difficult, and with bigger and stronger monsters coming up, and the robots only getting older, the situation had turned clearly in favour of the monsters who are found to be controlled by minds and on a mission to colonize Earth.

Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi gives the movie that right dose of memory, as they give to their giant machine in the story. Idris Elba gives a powerful performance throughout the movie. There is no romantic side to this story, and the feelings are of brotherhood and respect rather than some silly emotions of infatuation. The rest goes to the robots, except for some funny scenes. The movie is a fantastic visual treat, as if a wizard has combined his powers with a sorcerer of the other world. This is not a dark movie, as that ghost has currently gripped every story which is detached from the real world. There is beauty even in the monsters and the destruction that takes place, something which Transformers and The Avengers missed out on the artistic side. There is pure poetry in motion throughout the sequences involving the robots and the monsters. They are all beautifully done, with each minute detail given importance. There is even detail on the tiny insects which feed on the monsters – not that tiny when the humans see them though. The fight scenes are powerful and stylish, with 3D coming to the aid at the right moments. The cynics can stop asking scientific questions about the invasion as the creatures come out of portal underneath the ocean and not from underneath Earth in its literal sense. It might be surprising that just a portal answers so many questions, and in this case, it does. Another thing to be noted is that times flies throughout this movie, and one gets too busy with the movie that it goes unnoticed.

This is obviously different from Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy and therefore it is a crime to expect the same kind of thing here, even as there is the clear “del Toro tag” throughout the movie. Each and every detail of the robots and the monsters is to be looked at, for they are not simple giant robots and gigantic monsters. Gipsy Danger, the old model which saves the day differs considerably from Crimson Typhoon, the three armed robot with three pilots. The Russian robot Cherno Alpha gives another feeling at the mean time, and Striker Eureka comes up with its robotic structure almost the exact opposite. Coyote Tango, piloted by Stacker Pentecost has a lesser appearance. Even the monsters are never the same, as some of them can spit acid, some of them can fly, and some of them can move at lightning speed – none of them looking the same. The climate, and the whole setting of the fights also seem to assert this powerful detail which has been running through the movie. Another point is the use of collective memory, as a shared group of memories, only this time, it is really what it means literally. There is that world of shared memory and shared folders which we found easier to attach with the computers and electronic devices – it has such a powerful significance; and such a thing would solve the differences and save the world threatened by humans.

One question shall haunt me for a long time though; to watch this movie two or three more times or to be so satisfied with this spectacle that I take a break from watching movies. There are moments which can make one feel that it is the ultimate satisfaction, and as long as science fiction movies are considered, this is close enough to the same. There are all the morals and the inspiring factors in place, but there is no preachy side to this one. The moments to watch out for should be I. The first battle between Gypsy Danger and a monster (just because it is the first fight), II. The return of Gypsy Danger to the field (that moment of sudden appearance), III. The battle in the air (when the sword takes over), IV. The final underwater climax battle (from the moment the first monster strikes). There is no forgetting the use of ship as a weapon during that moment of awesomeness. This could be better summarized by saying that the movie has a very good beginning and a fantastic last fourty five minutes. It takes you to another world, where these monsters are real, and they can be beaten. There is inspiration, and there is the ability to keep you on the edge of your seats; there is the message of never-ending hope and the assertion of faith and belief. Along with that there is the rain and the water of the ocean which seems to have a purifying effect in 3D. The movie has a lot of trust and sharing of other’s memories going on, which points a lot to the current world. So what can we expect from a possible sequel than pure awesomeness? This one was a safe bet for me though, as there is one director who has never come close to disappointing me, and he is directing this movie.

The fact remains that Pacific Rim will continue the winning run of Warner Bros, and the reason for its success at this part of the world should be the trailers and the posters at the multiplexes which does nothing less than being impressive. Another thing is that the early reviews have all been very positive, and those which are negative, I wouldn’t call them reviews, as none of them has come up with any valid argument to not recommending this movie. It is a known truth that people love some random human being in a metal suit as they have appreciated Iron Man, and they also love robots, considering the huge success of Transformers with nothing much to offer in the last two movies of the series. Pacific Rim has both of them, and with the right people to handle the same. Considering the kind of audience the movie attracts, the only movie which can give some challenge is The Wolverine, as the release of White House Down next week here won’t change a thing, thanks to Olympus Has Fallen. R.I.P.D. and The Conjuring will attract only selected viewers, and RED 2 has a chance of making lesser impact than expected here. Then there would be The Smurfs 2 which would take not much of the audience of this movie away from action. The movie would stay in the theatres here till August unless The Wolverine comes up with a miracle, or there is an influx of Hindi and Malayalam movies of high quality.

Release date: 12th July 2013
Running time: 132 minutes
Directed by: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, Rob Kazinsky, Max Martini, Ron Perlman, Robert Maillet, Heather Doerksen, Burn Gorman