Captain Phillips
Crit
This was so gripping for so long that after a while I just got tired of being gripped, which is, I guess, part of the point: that one element of being a hostage is that after a long stressful period of knowing that life as you know it may be at an end--and that life as everyone knows it could be at an end for you at any moment--that inescapable high intensity may become . . . well, "boring" doesn't really seem the right word, but I don't have a better one.
Consistent with that, the most fascinating five minutes of the film comes after (spoiler alert!) the navy Seals rescue Captain Phillips from the pirates and he finds himself safe but in shock. The release from the intense stress is, counterintuitively, into a different variety of stress: he is unable to cope with the ordeal being over than he had shown himself capable of dealing with the ordeal while it was ongoing.
2 comments:
I think that "boring" might not be the best word for the oppressive monotony the besets the second half of this film (before the post-SEAL rescue, that is). To me, boring implies a negative and passive kind of stasis, while this movie (both in story and in filmic execution)is not static. Its not exactly forward moving, since Captain Phillips knows that the US Navy will never allow the pirates to successfully abduct him to Somalia, and the audience knows that the story will never allow the pirates to kill Captain Phillips, but the movie is nonetheless so incredibly tense and claustrophobic and gripping (as you said) that I felt and understood the suffering of the hostage, as well as of the abductors, even though I knew how the story was going to end.
Good point: it was a lazy word choice, but I'm still not sure I have a better one. My point is that the film does a remarkable job both of illustrating (for this, I think, if the meaning of Phillips's emotional paralysis after the rescue) and inflicting a level of tension that our species simply hasn't evolved to be able to deal with usefully. Obviously, the viewer doesn't go through an ordeal comparable to Phillips's--but I felt almost as if I had. It will be interesting to see whether All Is Lost treats us the same way.
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