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Thursday, April 15, 2021

The Greyhound (2020)

Yet another movie where Tom Hanks plays a decent guy caught in a bad situation--and usually one that actually happened. If you get onto a ship or a plane and find out that he is piloting it, take a pass and get on the next one, because pretty reliably it will encounter a near disaster, but most if not exactly all people will make it out alive, but not before a lot of harrowing events take place. Here he plays Ernest Krause, who was given command of a destroyer, the USS Keeling (its call sign was Greyhound), which led a convoy of 37 Allied ships across the Atlantic in early 1942. WWII historians know this section of history as the Battle of the Atlantic, a non-stop cat-and-mouse game between Allied ships and German U-boats that spanned the entirety of the war and cost thousands of lives. There is not a lot else happening in this, Krause's first crossing. The vast majority of “Greyhound” consists of Krause shouting orders about degrees and rudders and other things that will play to Naval historians way more than the average film watcher. The detail is clearly what drives the movie, and almost every order is repeated from Krause down through the chain of command. The special effects of storms and the captain's eye views along with his changing strategy to address it is all we get, and it is captivating in that simplicity.

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