Captain Phillips is a very average action thriller, marginally diverting the first time through, but nothing you would ever need to watch again. The story is not uninteresting, but it has no depth at all, and translated to a movie it’s limited by several factors: the seductive centrality of Phillips himself (who is not a super-interesting character,) and the eventual resolution of the situation by military might. The latter guaranteed that the final hour of the film would be a bunch of guys with guns looking through night-vision scopes, and endless, mind-numbing military jargon spoken through radios, like “I have two greens and one red, I need three greens.” The former guaranteed a rather one-dimensional story: the crew are reduced to uninteresting and interchangeable pawns, and once Phillips is a hostage the main line of dramatic tension is surrendered, shifting to a rather tedious and drawn out “kill the bad guys” action sequence.

I also think it was a mistake to tell the story from both sides – the Americans and the Somali pirates. First of all, the Somali pirates didn’t really have much of a story! Second, the dialog between the two captains – which is decent but quite overrated, in my opinion – was not really dependent on a two-sided narrative, and it winds up evaporating just when they needed it most (when they’re stuck in the lifeboat together.) Third, they didn’t really manage to humanize the pirates with this device, something that was clearly an objective of the film – they come across like mindless mob-goons, basically. I would even go so far to say that the interaction between pirates ultimately seems a bit like filler.

I can’t review Captain Phillips without comparing it to this year’s other Somali pirate film, A Hijacking, a fantastic film that’s totally superior to Captain Phillips in every way – depth and dimensionality of story, level and consistency of dramatic tension, character development, set-up, texture, music, and any other area you can think of. A Hijacking managed to not demonize the pirates without even so much as translating them, let alone telling their story! And since there is no U.S. Navy to take over the situation (it’s a Danish ship,) the film’s narrative remains just as interesting in its final third, rather than descending into a celebration of military execution and paraphernalia.

As for Tom Hanks deserving an Oscar nomination for Captain Phillips, he really doesn’t do much in the film. It’s a solid performance, but in retrospect it seems quite unmemorable.

In short, Captain Phillips is okay for a popcorn action flick, but it’s really nothing special.