Monday 7 September 2015

...the Captain Phillips film was like a badly rehearsed toddler's dance...

 I spent about half a century at sea and had my own run in with pirates, so went to the cinema, ready to sit and enjoy a (true) story about ships and pirates. 

I was astonished how bad, how carelessly researched it was.

Here's what I saw;

Captain Phillips flies out to join his ship, in uniform - and that's the last you see of him in it, or of any uniform. Onboard they all wore manky working clothes - or 'ealth 'n safety' high vis orange gear (even if you wore uniform onboard ship, you never travelled in it!).

They sailed without a local pilot (illegal) and in filming this, also used film of three different, not-so-lookalike Maersk ships...

Then they get to sea and the dialogue could have come out of Detroit - a car factory, I mean. 
Once example, they talked of, '..doing double shifts.' - no, its 'doubling up on watch'...small things that maybe would only annoy a marine pedant - until we come to the first chase by the pirates - and they were catching up fast on the American container ship BECAUSE THE AMERICAN SHIP WAS OBVIOUSLY ON DEAD SLOW AHEAD (SPEED) - SHE WAS PRACTICALLY DEAD IN THE WATER, AS IF WAITING FOR THE PIRATES TO CATCH UP - AND NOT THE NEARLY THIRTY MILES AN HOUR OR SO, IT SHOULD/COULD HAVE BEEN DOING.

Other detail, every shot of the radar screen, was both contradictory to what was then shown through the bridge windows, in plain sight - and also to each other...obviously they couldn't be bothered to make it life like- or maybe simply couldn't manage it.

And even the ordinary dialogue scenes didn't stand up. For example, some of the crew started balking at the threat of being attacked by Somali pirates, as if suddenly realising this - when the ship had already been trading between a port in the Yemen, and Djibouti, to Mombasa and then back up to Djibouti, so REGULARLY PASSING UP AND DOWN THE PIRATE COAST OF SOMALI - was this all their first trip??? - had no one told them about this (even then, world famous) pirate route - not shown them a chart of the route - a route back and fore between three countries, the middle one being Somalia ..???

Got up and left after half an hour - just couldn't take anymore.