A Review of “Greyhound (2020)”

 

Greyhound was a movie that flew under a lot of people’s “radar”. I did watch the initial trailer and I admit I was not really that impressed. However, with the coronavirus shutting down every cinema and theatre, Greyhound was instead put out on Apple’s streaming service which I honestly believe was for the best. The basic synopsis is “U.S. Navy Cmdr. Ernest Krause (Tom Hanks) is assigned to lead an Allied convoy across the Atlantic during World War II. His convoy, however, is pursued by German U-boats”. Greyhound is directed by Aaron Schneider, no clue on him, with a screenplay by Tom Hanks who is also the main star. Tom Hanks has written screenplays before but those were comedies and “Greyhound” however is a more serious movie. So I was mildly interested to see what Tom Hanks would produce.

Starting with the praises, after watching the movie, I really appreciated the fast pacing of the movie. A fair amount of people might think of this as a negative but I personally believe this worked in the movies favor. There are constantly dangerous encounters for the Greyhound and situations that keep as the audience invested. The action scenes are thrilling to watch even though its just boats shooting at U-boats.

I also love the sound design in this movie. Every missile shot feels big, every gunshot is loud and the torpedos flying underwater has an unsettling sound that feels like a ticking time bomb. The effects are also pretty good though noticeably CGI but not to the point that it ruins the movie. The music score does its job in building tension even though it does overuse a lot of the same honking noise every time.

A thing I wasn’t expecting with the movie was the really realistic take on how these ships are operated during a war. Seeing how the soldiers operated on these warships was very intriguing for someone like me who isn’t a serious history buff. The dialogue was very convincingly realistic and I am glad they didn’t shy away from the fact that people of African-American Ethnicity were mostly just messed attendants.

However, realism also creates some problems as well. Nearly every dialogue in this movie involves some jargon and for the most part the audience would be able to comprehend what they were talking about. Nevertheless, there are a fair amount of dialogue that just feels really confusing to non-army technical people which is a majority of the audience. While I did praise the movie for its realistic take, there is a certain thing in this movie that just kind of took me out of the movie. Throughout, the second half of the movie, the Germans for some reason find the radio frequency and just taunt the Greyhound for no reason except being an over the top villain. It just tears me away from the realism of the movie as it just feels incredibly stupid and not believable whatsoever.

This movie also goes through a sort of “Dunkirk” way of storytelling which is focusing on the scenario these people are in rather than developing the characters. This worked for Dunkirk but it didn’t really work as well here. The film begins setting up Ernest Krause (Tom Hanks) by having him ask Evelyn Frechette (Elisabeth Shue) for marriage to give him some backstory but it doesn’t really amount to anything by the end of the movie. Ernest Krause is a such a straight-up military man that it makes him a very boring protagonist to watch. It worked in Dunkirk as we can see the main character’s personality and their struggle for survival. In Greyhound, however, a majority of the characters are very lacking in any personality which makes it less interesting to watch when they are talking.

Additionally, there isn’t really any dramatic moments that happen in the movie. It justs “the U-boat has appeared!” and “the U-boat is gone!” for a majority of the movie with some missile shooting. It does this for 90 minutes and then the movie ends.  Once the movie ended, I didn’t really retain any memorable moments from the movie and just had an “okay” reaction.

Overall, the movie is all right. The movie succeeds in giving a tense submarine-thriller showing the ins and out of sea warfare that is interesting to watch and engaging enough to keep watching. The enjoyment will come from seeing how the Greyhound sailors deal with the life-threatening situation. It doesn’t have compelling characters or story but it does what it aims to do right and that is good enough.