Hey, I’d like to make a discussion thread on the new movie featuring Tom Hanks “Greyhound”, personally I thought it was a great film that any deck mariner could at least take a little bit of enjoyment from.
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I liked it
I have several thousand hours of deck watch on frigates and destroyers, and I thoroughly enjoyed the movie.
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It was certainly more accurate from a maritime standpoint than Captain Phillips!
Just watched it after shift. Most movies with a ton of CGI I don’t enjoy. This one I loved. It was tight, the run time was good, and the focus was very sharp. I think every Mariner will enjoy this movie. Even those who aren’t should appreciate another riveting character by Hanks.
Reports say they did some of the filming on the Fletcher class USS Kidd and took great pains to use her as a model for the sets they did have to build.
Brainstorming here after too much caffeine. What if we did a sequel with the same tight, focused viewpoint. But this time do it from either the U-boat or a merchantman on the same HX-25 crossing?
Sort of a same incident, different story point of view.
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Or remake the 1943 film, Action In The North Atlantic, though finding a modern actor who could fill Bogart’s shoes would be tough.
On a side note, there are very few films about merchant mariners, Action In The North Atlantic, Captain Phillips, and Lakeboat are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head.
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Haven’t seen it yet , but a relative has a copy and enjoyed it. Read yesterday not much water was used during filming, it was mostly digitally generated.
As a ‘technological improvement’, in this case, it serves the bottom line at the expense of realism and incidental collateral damage such as putting mariners working in the film industry as marine coordinators out of business.
Don’t forget about “Contraband” or what ever that mark wahlberg flick was…
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A documentary on the container shipping business…
Now if you’ll excuse me I need to take my carpet cleaner home in my dress blues 
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Question - I liked the movie except for one part. Was German sub skippers getting on the VHF (TBS as it was called in WW II) and tormenting the destroyer skippers with juvenile antics really a thing back then? I have read several autobiographies of U-Boat skippers and none of them mentioned anything like that and I would think jabbering on the radio like a drunk fisherman on CH 68 would be the LAST thing any sub skipper of any era would do.
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I agree. This was unrealistic. I doubt it was in the original C.S. Forester story. He was usually a a stickler for facts. I hope it was just a screenwriter’s embellishment, but a cheesy one at that.
I agree the producers did their homework and tried to get the details right in the CGI. It had the usual gray/sepia cast over it, which can seem unrealistic in some sea movies (did you see “In the Heart of the Sea”? 
) but for a story in the gray North Atlantic, the sepia filter thing didn’t stick out.
Only the most expensive CGI (ILM/George Lucas movies) get the sky/sea colors right.
When the CGI did stray from realism it was usually for narrative purposes. For examples, the movie had some “aerial” shots that showed the U-boats on the surface in close proximity to the convoy, to give the viewer the impression of the submarines menacing the ships, when in reality the U-boats would never have exposed themselves that way.
There was another recent naval movie “Midway" which I loved, that used this expedient too, showing ship and planes in close proximity. It did a good job of telling a visual story, even if the combatants were unrealistically close together.
I loved Greyhound, and part of the fun was trying to find tiny things to quibble about. Example:
The ships are in rough seas. Waves geysering from pitching bows. Sometimes the moviemakers showed interior scenes of the ships rolling and pitching. Sometimes, people and things swayed to the movement. But not always. Producers get this wrong in most sea movies. I can forgive them,
But then the steward comes up to the bridge with a tray of food and coffee for the captain. In rough seas. And the coffee cup is full to the brim. And he sets it all down on the chart table. Where the full-to the-brim coffee cup proceeds to stay perfectly full, and the chart stays un-covered by coffee, in defiance of all laws of physics.
But as I said, I loved the movie.
Representative “real” pictures, of WW2 DD’s. They aren’t the Fletcher class, but it really didn’t matter. . . Enjoy. For the record, I really like my DD duty in the early 70’s.
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There you go. Love it!
The only way moviemakers could get the movement right is to build their sets on gimbals. Very expensive, I imagine.
The only movie I can remember this being done is the 1981 German-made U-boat pic “Das Boat”. For that movie they made actual, detailed mock-ups of a U-boat interior and set them on gimbals, so that the actors had to counter the boat’s rolling.
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When the scouts did some warship experience event we spent the night on a diesel sub. I was amazed how much a “heavy” sub, heavy compared to my boat at least, jumped around and snatched at the dock lines when a front came through. My wife made us get undressed out on the deck, overnight was all it took to smell like we had been swimming laps in the fuel tank and maybe a holding tank sprint thrown in 
Which boat?
The Torsk. One of the issues with the sub was how the heads worked, they were essentially bolted to the top of the holding tank with a big seacock. I get why they did that, the system had to be blown out with high pressure air when submerged, but every time you open that valve you get the full effect of the tank wafting into the boat.
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Das Boot is a fantastic miniseries. It rivals the BBC’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (with Alec Guinness).