Okay. Deep breath. It's 1:48 AM and my heart is still doing this weird, stuttery thing in my chest. Like it's trying to find a normal rhythm but it can't. Just finished Greyhound on Apple TV+ and I feel like I've been personally depth-charged. For real. My living room is dark except for the glow of the TV showing the Apple TV "Are you still watching?" screen, and honestly, I'm not sure I am. I think a part of my soul is still out there in the Atlantic, somewhere in that pitch-black water.
I started this thing at like, 11:30 PM. Big mistake. I thought, "Oh, a Tom Hanks WWII movie. It'll be a nice, cozy, historical drama." I was sitting on my couch, curled up under a blanket, ready for some wholesome heroism. I was not prepared for this. This is not a movie. This is a 90-minute anxiety attack with a really good sound mix. I had my soundbar cranked up, and every time a depth charge went off, my whole apartment rattled. The cat shot me a look of pure, unadulterated hatred from his armchair and hasn't moved since. Sorry, dude.
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There's no fat on this thing. None. It just starts. Boom. You're on the ship. Tom Hanks is Captain Ernest Krause. He's quiet, he's tired, he's praying. And then... they're there. The "Black Pit," they call it. The part of the ocean where they won't have air cover. And the wolves come out. The U-boats. And the movie just... does not stop. For an hour. It's just "Contact, three-oh-five!" and "Hard left rudder!" and "Sound the general alarm!" and my brain is just trying to keep up.
There's this one moment that's just burned into my brain. It's not an explosion. It's not big. It's Krause, alone on the bridge, with a pair of binoculars and a stopwatch. He's trying to calculate the bearing and range of a U-boat he can't even see, based on the shadow of a periscope and the timing of its attacks. The camera is tight on his face, then on the compass, then on the chart. You can see the math happening in his head. No dialogue. Just the hum of the ship, the scratch of his pencil, the ticking of the stopwatch. It's so quiet. So intensely focused. I was leaning so far forward on my couch I think I pulled a muscle in my back. I was holding my breath. That scene has more tension than a hundred horror movie jump scares combined. It's the weight of all those lives, all that responsibility, resting on this one guy's ability to do math in his head while being shot at.
It reminds me of my grandpa. He wasn't in the navy or anything, he sold insurance. But his workshop... God, his workshop was a temple of order. Every wrench had a place on the pegboard, drawn in Sharpie outline. Every screw was in a labeled jar. I remember once, when I was maybe ten, I was "helping" him and I put his Phillips head screwdriver back in the flathead slot. He didn't say a word. He just walked over, picked it up, looked at the empty space, then looked at me. He didn't even look angry, just... sad. Like I had introduced a fundamental chaos into his universe. Krause has that same energy. The whole ship is his workshop, and every single thing, every sailor, every order, has to be in its exact right place, or the whole thing falls apart. I once tried to organize my own spice rack alphabetically and gave up after five minutes to order a pizza...
But honestly, now that I'm typing this... was it just Tom Hanks being Tom Hanks? The stoic, decent, overwhelmed-by-responsibility American hero? I mean, I was completely sold. I felt every flicker of doubt, every moment of exhaustion. But was I just watching Captain Phillips in a different uniform? Or Sully with more salt spray? I don't know. Maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe that's just his thing, and he's the best at it. But a tiny part of my brain is whispering that it was a little... safe? A little familiar? God, what a dumb thought. The man just commanded a destroyer through a wolf pack of Nazis for 48 hours straight without sleep and I'm critiquing his character's originality. Shut up, brain.
And the sound! THE SOUND! I mentioned the depth charges, but it's more than that. It's the scream of the shells overhead. The metallic clang of the guns firing. The hiss of the sea. The crackle of the radio. It's a symphony of terror. I physically flinched so hard during one attack sequence I almost knocked my laptop off the couch. My heart just seized up. It's so disorienting, the way they cut between the chaos on deck, the frantic calculations in the CIC, and the cold, underwater shots of the torpedoes streaking through the dark. You never know where the next threat is coming from.
Watching it on Apple TV+ felt weirdly appropriate, though. All that clean, minimalist interface, the sleek little remote. Then you press play and you're thrown into this muddy, terrifying, analog world of grease and steel and screaming. The contrast is jarring. I kept wanting to pause it just to look at my phone, to check my email, to do something... anything to break the tension. But I couldn't. The movie doesn't let you. It just keeps pushing, faster and faster, until the end. And when it was over, it was just... over. They get to the end of the Black Pit, and there's this moment of quiet relief. And then credits. No big epilogue. Just silence.
I'm still buzzing. My ears are ringing with phantom explosions. I need to watch something happy now. Like, a documentary about fluffy clouds or something. But I don't think I'll be able to sleep for a while. My brain is still at battle stations.
8.5/10 - solid
- alex