12/5/2023 0 Comments Captain phillips real story![]() In 2008, I was kidnapped by pirates in Somalia myself while reporting for the Sunday Telegraph. They're utterly convincing.Īnd I should know. The script also raises the question of whether Somali fishermen were driven into piracy by foreign trawlers who plundered the fish stocks in their unpoliced waters.īut there is no Oliver Stone-style lecturing, and the pirates, who are played in the film by untrained actors from the “Little Mogadishu” district of Minneapolis, are a terrifying presence. Eyl, the pirate port from where Hanks’s captors set out, is vividly brought to life as a modern-day Hispaniola, a lawless, dirt-poor place where buccaneering is the only decent living. The film touches on the root causes of the piracy crisis, which, at its peak in 2011, saw some 700 sailors in captivity. He was intrigued by how the open ocean, a place most people never go, is where the lifeblood of modern capitalism comes in contact with the chaos of Somalia, where decades of anarchy has led to the rebirth of a medieval barbarity like piracy. It was the sense of two different worlds colliding that made the story a draw for British director Paul Greengrass, the ex-documentary maker who was also behind the acclaimed United 93, about the hijacking of one of the four 9/11 airliners. I met him a few times, and he is a very nice gentleman, a very average Joe.” “I didn’t really care who played me, whether it was Danny DeVito or Tom Hanks, but Hanks does a very good job. So has the chip finally been torn from Phillips’s epaulette about the way the world sees merchant seamen? “It is a good film, yes, and it does portray a captain in peril,” he tells me. Four years later, the hostage story with the Hollywood ending received the Hollywood treatment, with Tom Hanks playing the hero in the critically-acclaimed hit movie Captain Phillips. Not bad for a bunch of sailors no one ever cared about. Phillips’s wife, Andrea, got a call of congratulation from a relieved President Obama, while Phillips went on to co-author a best-selling book, A Captain’s Duty. The drama, covered in real time on US television networks, made the seamen the toast of America. Finally, as the pirates tried to take Phillips to the Somali coast, two US Navy warships blockaded them, resulting in a tense three-day stand-off. Phillips, who was being held at gunpoint on the ship’s bridge, then allowed himself to be taken as collateral for a “prisoner swap”, figuring that one US hostage was better than 20. Instead, it turned into a tale of all-American heroism, as members of the crew, hiding below deck, turned the tables by overpowering the pirate leader and taking him hostage. If the shipping company wasn’t prepared to pay a ransom, there’d be no shortage of buyers on Somalia’s mainland, home to the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabaab movement.įor a time, it looked like becoming America’s worst US hostage crisis since the 1979 Tehran embassy siege, a serious test of President Obama’s mettle during his first months in the White House. Not because of the cargo on board, which included food aid for Rwanda, but because all but one of the 20 crew were Americans – a jackpot in terms of high-value hostages. Four years ago, his cargo ship, the Maersk Alabama, was hijacked by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean, handing the pirates a prize beyond their wildest dreams, the modern equivalent of a Spanish galleon full of bullion. It’s fair to say, then, that Phillips himself has broken radically with convention. As he puts it: “A lot of us have a chip on our shoulder. ![]() Not that anyone gave them a ticker-tape parade. ![]() In wartime, meanwhile, they are directly in the firing line, the US Merchant Marine suffering more casualties than any other American service as they brought tanks to Normandy and bullets to Okinawa. Without them, there’d be no Walmart, Asda or Amazon. In peacetime, they ship 90 per cent of everything you’ll ever buy, be it the flatscreen television you’re watching, the shoes you’re wearing or the car you’re driving. The way Captain Richard Phillips tells it, commercial sailors are the most unsung heroes ever to have cruised the seven seas. Captain Phillips will be shown on Boxing Day at 9pm on ITV This piece was originally published in October, 2013. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |