Greyhound 2020
This sounded like an interesting movie when it came out, but it was only showing on Apple TV, since Covid prevented it from showing in theaters. I finally got around to watching it five years later. Tom Hanks has helped tell a lot of World War II stories, and here he tells the story of a destroyer escorting a convoy of cargo ships to England in January 1942. The convoy is particularly vulnerable to U-boat attacked for the three days of the journey where there is no air cover. The planes are able to keep an eye out for U-boats since they spend most of their time surfaced. The U-boats operate in groups called wolfpacks that wreak havoc on convoys and their escorts, often attacking at night. For the most part the movie consists of several different U-boat attacks over the three-day period and it gets pretty intense. Hanks wrote the screenplay based on a fictional novel and he also plays the captain of a US destroyer whose radio call sign is Greyhound. The movie seems to do a decent job of showing how a destroyer detects and tracks a submarine and then how they fight against one, sometimes very close up, including depth charge attacks, naval guns, all the while avoiding incoming torpedoes. I don't know how realistic any of it is, but it makes for a good movie. It is a ficitional story, so it would be nice if there was a companion documentary that talked about more of the details of attacks with some real world examples. The movie itself doesn't break a lot of ground in its storytelling, with some kind of basic interaction among the crew and Hanks' girlfriend back home. So I can't give it an A, but how about an A- for a pretty good effort at showing the life of a very busy destroyer crew?
Written: 15 Jul 2025