This film is a skillfully made and suspenseful account of actual events. The fact that I still felt on edge and engaged, even knowing how things turned out—including what’s often talked about as the Captain Phillips finale—is quite remarkable. The question then becomes, why this story? It seemed to me like an exploration of being without agency, a movie that didn't portray anyone as good or bad, just people caught in circumstances beyond their control. There's a group of sailors who are easily targeted by pirates, and there are the pirates who ultimately don’t succeed. Regardless, neither side seems to have any real command over what happens to them; they appear to be responding to some larger, mostly invisible force. After the crew manages to avoid an initial pirate attack, one of them remarks that as a member of a union, he didn't agree to this level of risk. The response is blunt: "What did you expect?" Later, when a pirate cuts his foot on broken glass, someone asks him the same question. Even the two leaders—the pirate captain and the main character—eventually find themselves influenced (or rescued) by governmental power. What did they anticipate? To be in charge?

Source on TMDB