Watched Captain Phillips (2013) by Paul Greengrass tonight with my family.
Starring Tom Hanks, Yul Vasquez, Barkhad Abdi (new Somali actor)
So, this is another "based on true story" as told by the book of Captain Richard Phillips that captained the ship Maersk Alabama 8 days prior to the hijacking and his kidnapping by a group of Somali pirates in April 2009.
The story is based on a book, which has been rewritten by a scriptwriter, told with opinions from media and so on. So I can't regard the whole thing as a true story. People who take something from a movie without a grain of salt should be re-schooled. Wikipedia and even CNN has a more balanced coverage on this, so I left the plot out and go straight to my opinion on the movie itself:
It is tense, engaging, and relieving at the same time. So it does not really makes you sweat cold, but enough to engage you in the constant suspense as the hostage drama keeps boiling. Tom Hanks is very brilliant actor, and it kinda shows here, especially near the end of the movie where he expressed frustration and shock, i never saw it, but it is something new. Then there is our American Somali actor, Barkhad Abdi, which play the lead pirates. He is very convincing in his role and quite realistic I have to say.
Other than that, you military buffs might get annoyed with typical Hollywood dramatization over simple military stuffs. They change several terms to sound more sophisticated, and they are too busy (compared to the publicly-released real world recorded audio of US Navy or US Air Force radio chatters). I don't know what to say about this, but the SEAL team is like a franchise now. Surely, US Navy did their marketing right, just like Top Gun did with naval aviation. USAF simply failed miserably by shaking hands with the evil Michael Bay and the silly-stupid Transformers series. Nobody remembers USAF's involvement. It is still awesome and cool though to see US Navy frigates in action, and as a bonus, an amphibious assault carrier.
Overall I give it a glad-handed 8/10. Minus point for claiming it "true story" just as many other Hollywood-claimed-to-be-realistic production has mislead the majority of the world and some already getting people killed (inciting anti-US and ignorance about guns).