Another free ticket from the Daily Telegraph, this time for the new film Captain Phillips, which is based on a true story of an American ship hijacked by Somali pirates off the coast of Africa.
With Tom Hanks as Captian Phillips, the quiet, confident American Captain, and an asortment of Somalis as the pirates, it was a tense thriller, well-acted, well-scripted and very plausible to anyone who reads the news - unsurprising, since it was based on a true story, although I'm not sure what bits were fact and what were fiction. Suffice to say that the fact that Captain Phillips' ship was hijacked and that he survived was fact, but what went on in between may have owed a lot to poetic licence.
It did, however, raise some intersting questions. Should ransoms ever be paid to Somali "Mr. Bigs", who will used the millions extracted from Western countries to purchase arms to be used against them? Should merchant ships travelling in East African waters be armed, so that they can defend themselves? Should they travel in a convoy or with and armed escort? Who should be prosecuted - the actual pirates, who get very little out of it, or the warlords/gangsgters who make millions but never do the actual dirty work?
The film didn't seek to answer any of these questions, but they were obvious things that would occur to anyone watching it.
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