CREDIT: DISNEY ENTERPRISES, INC. (2016)
With little hope and great courage, two men in different places struggle to save the lives of many.

The storm blows in. Quiet at first. Small snowflakes you can catch on your tongue. But the quiet doesn’t last. The winds pick up, the blizzard takes hold and you can hear the crashing seas from miles away. It is then, as you desperately attempt to tie down fishing boats that you hear the word, a second oil tanker, the Pendleton, ripped in half by the storm, with no help coming.

In The Finest Hours, a United States Coast Guardsman, played by Chris Pine, does his best to follow orders with his three, somewhat reluctant companions, as the Pendleton’s disliked engineer, played by Casey Affleck, struggles to keep floating long enough for help to come. The plot occasionally heads back to shore to focus on Pine’s girlfriend, but the true action is at sea.

There are several things the movie does well. The intensity of the storm and the urgency of the rescue mission both come across well in almost every moment. Great effort was clearly made to try and stay true to the incredible truth of events, even as improbable as those events are. Both Pine and Affleck play their parts with an amazing amount of dedication. Impressively, Pine doesn’t express his inner Kirk even once in the course of the film.

The “almost” in the previous paragraph is where the problems start. While those scenes taking place on the Pendleton and on Pine’s tiny rescue boat are extremely well done, the film has a bad habit of flipping, often in the middle of extremely intense scenes, to the shore. There we follow the panic of the girlfriend Miriam Webber, played by Holliday Granger.

It’s often difficult to include important information that isn’t part of the action, but The Finest Hours makes these transitions especially frustrating and tedious. Instead of waiting for a natural lull in the action, the director appears to have decided that awkward cliff-hangers are the way to go. So many times Affleck’s character is about to do something extremely important, or something happens on the ship, and before that action is resolved the scene cuts away, destroying the dramatic tension the movie works so hard to build.

This is especially infuriating because the movie is, otherwise, excellent. Sure, some of the CG should have been done with models for greater realism, and yes, the musical score does repeat the same two notes from “My Heart Will Go On”, but these are minor issues, although reminding the audience of one of the best boat-sinking movies of all time may have been a poor judgement call by the composer.

Overall, The Finest Hours is an excellent story told well. Yes, the movie is far from perfect, but most of the problems are minor annoyances rather than plot-breaking failures. For those looking for an intense disaster movie with a romantic subplot (à la Armageddon), look no further.