‘Greyhound’ Movie Review - Visually Amazing But Lacks Everything Else

Release Date: 10 July 2020
Genre: Drama, War
Director: Aaron Schneider
Writers: C.S. Forester (novel), Tom Hanks (screenplay)
Stars: Tom Hanks, Elisabeth Shue, Stephen Graham
Plot:
In the early days of WWII, an international convoy of 37 Allied ships, led by captain Ernest Krause (Tom Hanks) in his first command of a U.S. destroyer, crosses the treacherous North Atlantic while hotly pursued by wolf packs of Nazi U-boats.

 

REVIEW:

Directed by Aaron Schneider, Greyhound is a war film focused on a single mission that takes place in the beginning of United States participation in World War II. Navy Commander Ernest Krause (Tom Hanks) is assigned to lead an allied convoy across the Atlantic. It is the first mission assigned to him despite having a long career in the navy. Krause is in command of the USS Keeling called Greyhound)and while it is not expected to be an easy mission, the challenge is much greater than everyone initially thought. A group of Nazi submarines stalks the convoy to prevent it from reaching its destination.

 

The film is based on the book "The Good Sheperd" written by CS Forester, has a script penned by Tom Hanks. Krause is a good man who must face a huge challenge, much greater than even thought, and must carry out his task in the right way, even in a situation where every decision is a matter of life and death and there is no time to be wrong.

 

Krause is a deep believer and that runs through his thinking and his mission. Forester's novel from the title has that double meaning. The ship must take care of the convoy as a shepherd takes care of his flock. His decisions are the product of his intelligence, knowledge, and ideas, but his strength is backed by his faith. Every death he can't avoid weighs him down. It costs him to celebrate the losses of the enemy and refers to the first dead that he manages to destroy as "fifty souls". That does not stop the mission, rather it confirms that it is a mission, with the good and the bad, with the negative consequences even in the belief of doing the right thing. Krause is a hero with doubts, known to be watched by his crew, who carries life-meaning decisions on his shoulders. In silence he endures wounds silently, only at the end it is discovered that his feet bleed. Nor does he manifest the deep pain before the loss of one of his quietest and closest collaborators, the only one who seems to be just as faithful as he is. Krause fulfills his mission, occupying his rightful place. When in the end, confident and convinced, he wants to go for more, he instantly accepts the order given to him and returns to his new task, although it is not as heroic as the one he has just completed.

 

As for the narration itself, Greyhound is a fully concentrated naval war film, without turns. It has a main character and from there all its themes derive.

 

It's a difficult challenge to portray the battle between a destroyer and a submarine in a film. This movie never really pulls that off, it's like listening to one side of a telephone conversation. The German U-boats never seem to be part of the narrative. They try to bring the U-boats in with their radio broadcasts which come across more as obscene phone calls than viable dialogue.

 

Almost exactly half of the dialogue is sailors repeating a series of orders "Right standard rudder!" "Right standard rudder, aye aye!" "Steady ahead on 091!" "Steady ahead on 091, aye aye!" "Contact bearing port 015, range 900 yards!" Repeat the above dozens of times and you have 95% of the dialogues of the movie.

The climax was not up to the mark and to be exact, there is no climax in the film.

 

Only positive is the film look amazing and it is right on technical terms, the visual departments knocked it out of the park and that's the only reason I have no regret watching this film.

 

Final Score:[6.5/10]
Reviewed by: Greg Becker

In case you are interested in watching this movie, Here is the trailer for same: