Don’t get me wrong, you won’t find a whiff of good dialogue or characterisation here. It’s all exposition, but in the chess match narrative that’s perfectly acceptable. It’s a tense standoff between Tom Hanks and pirates (no Johnny Depp here) and it works very well; realism lending a crucial believability to unfamiliar action elements. You don’t expect to think about the consequences of wake, but Greengrass’s film uses this and other devices in an intelligent, communicable way. Captain Phillips gets my recommendation as a highly effective and well-conceived alternative blockbuster.