![]() “Greyhound” does a sturdy job of depicting one of them.Apple TV+ is set to release new movie Greyhound on Friday, July 10, which yet again plunges Tom Hanks into the battlefield of World War II. What was it like to fight in WWII? For those of us who’ll never know, that question has a thousand answers. ![]() And on the final day, when the Greyhound crew have used up nearly all their depth charges and the air cover comes in seemingly in the nick of time, you feel a surge of relief and triumph. The Germans intercept the radio signal to send mocking messages (“Did you think you’d slipped away from this gray wolf? You and your comrades will die today”). oil tanker comes out of nowhere, and as the two ships edge close enough that the Greyhound scrapes a gash into the side of the other ship, we realize it’s a Titanic situation, with our heroes as the iceberg. When the mortars aren’t firing, the movie ebbs, flows, occasionally sags, and sometimes rivets. He says “Understood” and thanks the bringer of bad news. He keeps a rigorous watch on his men (he considers it a breach of ethics if they so much as utter a curse word), he says grace over the most makeshift snack, and when he learns that the radar is down, even in the heat of a U-boat attack he doesn’t bark out a word of frustration. The scene humanizes an officer who turns out to be a sternly religious man who lives every moment by a strictly observed code. When we first see him, he’s saying his prayers and washing his face, and the film then cuts to a Christmas 1941 hotel-lobby rendezvous between Krause and his beloved, Evie ( Elisabeth Shue), parting just as the war begins. Hanks’ Krause, known to his friends as Ernie, is the officer as gung-ho conservative gentleman. The picture takes us through an experience, with a quota of spectacle but no gratuitous “explosive” razzmatazz, and it’s grounded in Hanks’s finely etched but nearly minimalist performance. “Greyhound,” a battle drama that’s only 80 minutes long if you don’t count the credits, turns war itself into the main character. Actors like Stephen Graham, as the loyal navigator Cole, and Rob Morgan, as the quietly compassionate African-American messmate George Cleveland, make their presence felt. Most of the characterizations feel a little thin (because, frankly, they are). The fetishistic military detail is, in many ways, more potent than the drama, since “Greyhound,” which was scripted by Hanks and produced by his company, Playtone (the director is Aaron Schneider), hews to a diary-like discipline in depicting the humdrum dailiness of war. ![]() A lot of the battleships-at-sea images are digital, and you can tell, yet even so the film does a scrupulous job of recreating actual war footage. Though much of the action is set in the open air of the ship’s command perch, “Greyhound” often feels like a submarine thriller: tense, tight, boxed-in. For approximately 50 hours of travel time, the ships are on their own, navigating the darkest of storm-tossed waters - though the real threat are the U-boats that keep popping up like the shark in “Jaws.” Can the crew of the Greyhound blow a hulking submarine out of the water before the sub does the same to them? Krause has a knack for barking out directions at his men with a turn-on-a-dime precision that can serpentine a ship like the Greyhound right out of the path of a speeding torpedo. ![]() In February 1942, the Greyhound is leading a convoy of 37 troop-and-supply ships through the most dangerous section of the North Atlantic: the so-called “Black Pit,” named for the fact that it’s too far from either continent for the military to maintain air cover.
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