Mini-Movie Review: Greyhound (AppleTV+)
Over the past weekend, I was looking for a movie to watch. I decided that I should probably just try to watch a movie each week from the different streaming services that I subscribe to in order to maximize their value–as you’ll see, there are services that I subscribe to that I rarely watch or use, even though they have excellent content. Most of the time, it is because I pretty much focus on the “Big 2″ (which, for me, are Netflix and Amazon Prime Video). Hulu and Tubi are distant (way distant) third and fourth places.
However, one service that I alsways forget that I have (thanks to a promotion for when I got my iPhone, is AppleTV+. They have a couple of shows that I’m interested in, but haven’t yet seen (For All Mankind and See). I thought I’d watch them during the pandemic after school was over, but then there were the high profile cases of police brutality and resulting protests in the US that captivated me and so, I still haven’t seen them yet. However, after visiting each service and not really finding anything that jumped out to me, I actually remembered AppleTV+, and when I went on, I remembered that they had a movie from Sony that I’d seen the previews on and thought might be pretty good so, I decided to give it a watch.
Greyhound Movie Trailer
Greyhound
The screenplay was written by Tom Hanks, who also stars as the captain of the destroyer tasked with protecting a convoy of merchant marine ships during WWII from the predations of German U-Boats in the Atlantic Sea. There are two other destroyers to help in the task, but the story focuses around his ship and his crew.
After a brief set-up, the story gets started in earnest, and we see his motivation for wanting to do everything he can to survive and come back home safely. The movie is short, a little over 90 minutes, but it is an intense 90 minutes. You feel for the safety of the crew, the ship, and the convoy. This movie did, in 90 minutes, what Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight wasn’t able to do, for me, in 2 hours and 32 minutes.
This shows that the power of traditional storytelling–exposition, complications leading to rising, action, a climax, a resolution, a denouement (falling action) along with a character epiphany. This movie has all of these traits, and while short, is still one of the most intense movies that I’ve seen this year. I have to say that I really enjoyed it. It is a war movie, so keep that in mind going in–if military stories bore you, then chances are good that you won’t like this unless you get swept up in the tension of what happens in the story.
Other Elements
This movie isn’t only a war story, however. It also makes a statement about faith and religion. Unlike many “faith-based” movies that have come out over the past few years, it doesn’t put faith over the story, nor does it set out to tell the audience how to think. It just allows its main character to show his expressions of faith in both the context of the story and his outlook on the events of the story and then leaves it up to the audience to judge. Some might argue that the inclusion of those elements are actually pushing it on the audience–and that’s their right to argue that point, but for me, I saw it as simply showing how one man’s faith was put into practice (and tested) over the course of the story in which he tries to keep himself, his crew, and the ships he’s charged to protect alive.
Another element that I noticed was role of African Americans. I think the African American actors did an excellent job portraying the characters in the movie, but they were the typical “subservient” cooks roles. Now, again that’s going to be because of the time-period, and the screenplay takes pains to show how integral one of the cooks was to the ship in a poignant and affecting scene, so I can’t fault the movie–even though I do fault the time-period. Still, the movie handled the race issue as sensitively as I felt it could–it was just disappointing not to see more of those actors in relation to the overall story as they were pretty good actors in their own sense of pathos and duty.
Overall Rating: A (95-98)
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Is this a perfect movie. No, not by a long-shot. There are things that I wish were a little better. The ending felt a bit rushed, there was the limited on-screen time for the African American actors/characters, and there were a couple of smaller issues that could have been ironed out, but overall, I had a tense, but enjoyable time watching the movie.
I’ve not felt this excited about seeing naval battle sense Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. I really liked it and felt that both Sony and Apple scored a win with this one.
Sidney
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I, Mage (Urban Fantasy Story)
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