Filmology Rating: 2.5 out of 4

On February of 1952, one of the worst storms to ever hit the East Coast struck New England, damaging an oil tanker off the coast of Cape Cod and literally ripping it in half. A small lifeboat of four members of the Coast Guard faced the frigid temps and 70-foot waves to rescue more than 30 stranded sailors trapped aboard the rapidly sinking vessel. This is still considered one of the greatest and most daring small boat rescues still to date. As you can assume, the occurrence was an extremely intense event and this movie nailed it. One of the greatest ideas or concepts of this film is how small humans are compared to the vastness of the ocean. The Finest Hours really conveys the idea that we are all so small and helpless when in the hands of Mother Nature. You feel as though you are in the boats with the rescue team and also inside the sinking ship with the other crew, which adds to very intense scenes that will leave you at the edge of your seat. These intense scenes are separated by cut scenes of the romantic interest back home when Miriam is worrying about her Coast Guard man Bernie Webber, who is played by Chris Pine. However, the cut scenes in the movie were an aspect that bothered me. The movie opens up with their first date and then cuts quickly to a few months in the future where they then decide to get engaged. This all happens so fast that it doesn’t give you time to feel connected to the couple. Then, throughout the whole movie, it jumps to her worrying about Bernie while she is back home. While I completely understand the worrying for your fiancé on the boat, it just didn’t really work for the film. It ended up losing a lot of the intensity that the film had previously spent time building up to. Every time the scene goes back home to the love interest, I felt upset almost. I would’ve changed the scenes that built to this love story and instead have started with the already established relationship between the two. I would then have focused less on Miriam back at home and more on the rescue with the sinking ship because this is where I feel the audience wants to be due to the excitement. These moments in the film were fantastic to watch and the sounds of everything furthered the feeling of being there with the men. So, apart from the cut scenes back home and a cheesy ending, this movie was very enjoyable to watch and would highly recommend it.

Rating: See It 

-Nick