I love the book The Cruel Sea and was very disappointed in the movie based on it. I’m sure I’ll see Greyhound sooner or later.
I couldn’t tell you, I never saw that, and it doesn’t appear to be easily available to me. The trailers on YouTube made it seem interesting, but I don’t really have enough information to make a sound judgement.
I just watched “Greyhound” today and I gotta say it is kinda “meh.”
I really wanted to like it. A good WWII movie is long overdue and this is great subject matter for a movie.
While I am mostly glad the movie didn’t dwell on everyone in the crew’s lives and their personal struggles having none meant I just didn’t care about them. The little we get with the captain was such a nothing burger I don’t know why they bothered. I am always happy to see the beautiful Elizabeth Shue but her grand total of maybe two minutes of screen time (if that) didn’t help anything.
I might have forgiven all of that if the battles were gripping but they just weren’t. We never get shown the horror of being on a ship with a torpedo about to hit (perspective of a merchant ship) and knowing you will be in the icy Atlantic. We never see the struggle captains would have to sail on and leave the people in the water to drown and the utter horror of being in the water and watching everyone sail away and you know you will die there.
There was no “Das Boot” moments from the perspective of the German crews and what they were experiencing. They were just caricatured, faceless bad guys. We see Tom Hanks have a moment of regret having killed a U-boat but it doesn’t last long and we don’t care.
There were no “Star Trek TOS: Balance of Terror” games of cat and mouse as the captains try to out think and out maneuver each other. There was a little bit of that but mostly things just happen. Poof there is a U-boat next to you…no lead up to getting there, it is just there. There were a couple moments with the decoy (used once) and a U-boat trying to reverse course…that’s about it.
Almost out of ammo? Well, don’t fire full spread which you can’t do anyway and that part is done.
Low fuel? Be careful with that. Don’t need to worry about that anymore.
And so it all went. I just didn’t care about any of it. Not the fights, not the people, not the environment they were in…just all meh.
I think there was a lot that could have been done with this movie and I think they just phoned it in. The acting was fine but it could not overcome the poor directing and the overall production.
6/10
Counterpoint: Hanks wrote That Thing You Do!, which was great.
Another review indicated that you don’t even see German bridge crews when they are on the surface.
As another reviewer pointed out, the U-boat crews taunting the destroyers over the radio was complete nonsense and unhistorical.
U-boats were extremely careful to maintain radio silence as much as possible, so as not to reveal their positions - and especially when shadowing a convoy. In addition, they wouldn’t even have had the ability to broadcast on the escort vessels’ frequencies.
If they were able to listen in on the escorts’ radio conversations, there would have been absolutely no logic to broadcasting taunts and causing them to change frequency, rather than quietly continuing to listen in.
The fact that Tom Hanks put this in the movie (it’s not in the book) shows that he has no feel for U-boat warfare.
My husband enjoyed Greyhound. I did not. 30 minutes into the film I realized, ‘Oh, it’s going to be like this for the rest of the movie’ Then I had the thought that people loved the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan so OF COURSE someone needs to make a movie that is ‘all WWII action’. Naval warfare doesn’t have the cinematic appeal of D-day. Naval warfare where one side is pretty much always underwater even less so. I think 90 minutes of D-day would get stale and boring too, though.
You can watch the first 30 minutes of Greyhound, then the last 5 minutes or so and it’s basically the same movie.
I’m going to spoiler these, not because it matters, because you know… history, but also to see if I can figure out tags:
[spoiler] I agree that the characters and events are odd. Woman in the beginning is never to be seen again. Food guy keeps bringing food! He’s black, does that mean something? I don’t know. Crewmen were in a fight, and it completely doesn’t matter. A guy sneezes! the drama!
The stats for U-boat versus allied ships is not good. Cherry picking makes sense here because otherwise the movie would be terribly depressing.[/spoiler]
I would recommend watching the movie “Das Boot”.
There is a LOT of drama to be had when stuck in a submarine with nowhere to go and you can, literally, hear the ship above hunting you and getting closer (everyone on the ship can hear it).
Greyhound failed but that does not mean there is nothing there drama-wise. It just means they did a bad job.
The Cruel Sea was an awesome book.
The movie was very…British. At that time the British seemed to have eschewed conventional storytelling technique of building up to a climax, and just do “flat” movies. plot plot plot plot done.
Maybe it’s more like the actual war, but I don’t think it is good storytelling.
The book also got more into the daily grind of not having enough officers and everyone doing 16-20 hour days and all the time the sea is trying to kill you as much as the Germans. In the whole book, did they ever even get one submarine? I don’t think so. All that effort and cost and after the ear when someone asks “what did you do in the war?” all you can really say is “we escorted freighters. Not sure we actually made a difference. Oh and we got sunk.”
So it’s a problem that a British movie based on a British book about the British Navy is not American enough? 
And it’s too authentic? 
They got two, both in the book and the movie.
At least it’s not shoveling shit in Louisiana.
I enrolled in the 7-day free trial, just to watch Greyhound, and yeah, it’s nowhere near the film, Das Boot (Director’s Version) is.
But, I enjoyed it. As the reviews say, it’s a Dad Movie, and it’s a procedural. It’s got 80% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and most reviewers are giving it 3 to 4 stars out of 5. It worked great for this dad, because the main reason I turn off films is if the characters have bad lines, trendy characterization, or if the characters do really dumb shit to serve the plot lines. Greyhound avoids all that.
So, it’s a B+ film, but one that doesn’t insult your intelligence. For the most part. The introductory scene with Elizabeth Shue was clumsy, and the taunting over the radio should not have been included, since apparently it was something that did not actually occur.
Directing a film like Greyhound would be a tough, because the thrust of the film is the confusion and the simultaneous challenges. Attack. Rescue. Coordinate. And Shepherd — while dealing with attacks from multiple sources. In most military films (e.g. Das Boot) the conflicts are more sequential; there aren’t quite so many balls in the air.
I think the one got away. The one where they depth charged their own guys in the water.
I think that’s a feature of the book. All that work and not much concrete to show for it. Not everyone is an ace, Some go the entire war and never kill a single German. But their effort was still important, just hard to quantify, or revel in glory, depending on how you want to be looked at after the war.
Yes, but there were two more.
Sachertone as for the comment “The stats U-boat versus allied shipping is not good.” Those stats were in favor of the U-boats until 1943. It was safer to be in the Army or Marines then the Merchant Marine. Of all the services in WWII the Merchant Marine had the highest loss rate.
I just watched parts of The Cruel Sea again. It really is a brilliant movie, and a deserving counterpart to Das Boot.
It’s a pity it’s not better known outside the UK.
It was filmed with real ships, only a few years after WWII. The technical advisors and many of the extras were ex-navy men, so it’s highly authentic. The film was (and still is) highly regarded in the British Navy.
You even see some compassion for a U-boat crew, after they have surfaced and abandoned their sinking sub, and been picked up by the frigate. “They don’t look very different from us, do they?”
I’ll see if I can post some clips if anyone is interested.
I read the book (The Good Shepard) as a 4th Grader, (in Readers Digest Condensed form), and it was blah. Nothing much there. What I did love was the hymn quotation the author started with. (The little bit of poetry or epigram authors quoted at the start of a book or a chapter).
There were ninety and nine that safely lay
In the shelter of the fold.
But one was out on the hills away.
Far off from the gates of gold.
Away on the mountains , wild and bare .
Away from the tender shepherd’s care.
After that, the book was disappointing, but I’ve always remembered it for that quotation.
So…no U-571?
Agreed. Loved (and still love) the book; thought the movie was a big disappointment. Nice to see Denholm Elliot in a very early role, though.
Yes, that sums it up for me as well.
When the 5 U-boots were spotted, I thought we were in for a tense time, but fade to black and next scene nothing.
And while I like playing computer games, I don’t need movies to look like them. I find it really jarring lately, like uncanny-valley-De Niro in The Irishman.