Captain Phillips and the Subhuman Pirates

I got some free tickets this week to see Captain Phillips at the cinema. “The true story of Captain Richard Phillips and the 2009 hijacking by Somali pirates of the US-flagged MV Maersk Alabama, the first American cargo ship to be hijacked in two hundred years”, is how it is sold. Tom Hanks plays the captain of the title, and we are promised, “simultaneously a pulse-pounding thriller, and a complex portrait of the myriad effects of globalization”[1]. What we get is a boring film full of American end-of-empire angst with a not very subtle portrait of Somalis as entirely subhuman.