Saving Private Ryan
of
Steven Spielberg
It’s a World War II movie that has some of the best sequences we’ve ever seen in the genre, and also a very powerful story, where
Tom Hanks
stood out in his role. This project reaffirmed the friendship between the actor and the director, and also made them partners in several related series, such as
War Brothers
,
The Pacific
and the recent
Masters of the Air
, a collaboration that did not continue with what may have been the most personal war project of the star of
Forrest Gump – The Storyteller
.
The American star dedicated several years of her life to bringing to the cinema the novel “The Good Shepherd,” written by British author C.S. Forester over half a century ago. However, when she had already filmed it and set a release date, a pandemic crossed her path and forced Sony Pictures to sell the project to Apple, which wasted no time and released it directly on its streaming service.
This caused great sadness to the screenwriter, producer, and main actor
:
This breaks my heart. I don’t want to upset my superiors at Apple right now, but the image and sound quality isn’t the same [in the transition from cinema to television].
, he said in an interview with The Guardian.
A little-known story from World War II
Although it does not compare to the grand cinematic and war spectacle that was Saving Private Ryan,
Greyhound: Enemy’s Line of Sight
(2020) also managed to immerse us in
a tense, intense, and highly rigorous war story
, this time swapping the beaches of Normandy for the stormy seas of the North Atlantic.
In “Greyhound,” we follow the journey of Commander Ernest Krause (Tom Hanks) in command of a large convoy of 37 Allied ships during the early days of the United States’ involvement in World War II, constantly under threat from German submarines. In a 90-minute film in which, we repeat, there’s barely two minutes to catch one’s breath and thus becomes boring due to some minor subplots.
In fact, Greyhound, once its protagonists are introduced, focuses almost exclusively on the anti-submarine warfare methods used by Krause to keep the enemy at bay and accomplish his mission, not without losing some ships along the way, offering a remarkably powerful survival story that is worth watching. All this, along with other attractions such as the depiction of lesser-known events from World War II, earned the film very positive reviews, with 78% approval on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7/10 from audiences on IMDb. Flaws certainly exist; the lack of character development is mentioned, but in this case, I see it more as a virtue, since there are no distractions from the story.
Greyhound is a relatively modest film, funded with just over $50 million, but it’s more than enough to achieve its goal, which, once again, stems from Tom Hanks’ personal determination and tenacity in bringing this story to the big screen. In fact, development of this film began several years before its release, with
the actor writing a script
– an area he wasn’t familiar with in the industry – which he then tried to sell personally to several studios. It was Sony that made the winning bid, and amid the Covid-19 pandemic, passed the baton to Apple.
The company, in search of impactful stories that could attract audiences to subscribe to its streaming service, ended up releasing the film exclusively on Apple TV+ in July 2020, without any theatrical release.
Greyhound: Enemy’s Line of Sight
it is still available to watch on the platform; due to its story, pacing, and one-and-a-half-hour runtime, it’s a highly recommended movie.
Read the article at radarsantri.com