After college, I became a huge fan of C.S. Forester. I of course read all of the Hornblower books (and still vastly prefer them to the overwritten Patrick O’Brian Aubrey-Maturin series). I eventually read most of the rest of his books, but even though it’s lesser known by far, his last non-Hornblower fiction novel is, I believe, his best.

The Good Shepherd is a tale of a U.S. destroyer desperately fighting for its own life and the lives of thousands of others against a relentless Nazi U-boat wolfpack. It remains to this day one of my all-time favorite novels.

It’s in some ways surprising that it has taken 45 years to adapt Shepherd, but upon seeing the results, I’m glad they waited.

In Greyhound, now available on Apple TV+, Tom Hanks has taken Forester’s book and brought it brilliantly to the screen. It’s Hanks’s first screenplay in 9 years, and only the third film he’s written in his long career (although he is also credited with writing several episodes of the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.)

The movie changes some details. Notably, the novel’s USS Keeling is now the titular USS Greyhound (at least in part, I suspect, because the latter made for a better film title than the former), and Hanks’s character got a promotion from commander to full captain. His character’s name, Krause, isn’t changed, but I don’t recall anyone calling him by that in the movie – he’s always either “captain” to his crew or “Greyhound” to other ships (following the Naval tradition of calling the captain by his ship’s name in ship-to-ship communication).

Edit: On a second viewing, I noticed that both Shue’s character and his executive officer, played by Stephen Graham, call him “Ernie”, but his last name is only revealed in the credits.

In the refreshingly tight editing of the movie (it’s a scant 91 minutes), we learn very little about Krause or anyone else on the crew. This isn’t one of those movies with 90 minutes of action and 100 minutes of character flashbacks. We know that Krause is old for his position, and we learn early on that this is his first command. But unlike in the book, we never find out why. We know he’s alone, having left his girlfriend (Elisabeth Shue) behind in San Francisco when he got his promotion, she choosing to stay behind instead of accepting his proposal of marriage. (Krause in the novel is recently divorced.)

But that scene in the opening minutes of the movie showing a Christmastime meeting between Shue and Hanks is the only part of the movie that doesn’t take place on the cramped confines of the ship or at sea. The movie, like the novel, is more about the constant tension and exhaustion of the men who endured several days of almost nonstop attacks from enemy submarines from almost the moment they moved out of range of U.S. escort aircraft until they reached the safety of British-based air support.

Subs of the era stood no chance at all against aircraft; likewise, the mostly unarmed merchant ships were sitting ducks to the wolf packs on the open sea. The Allies’ only real hope was in their fast, nimble destroyers, but ships at sea can only see so far… and only move so fast.

Forester’s book doesn’t just tell of the men who were willing to put themselves between a sinking vessel and a submarine’s torpedoes, though. He also wanted to tell the story of two inventions that helped turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic: surface radar and sonar. The movie makes clear that these are important, but again, it’s so well written and edited that it never starts to feel like a history lecture. The average viewer, in fact, would be unaware of how new and revolutionary those were.

It’s interesting that in telling the story of a sea captain in way over his head, Hanks chose a director with a similar lack of experience – Greyhound director Aaron Schneider has only one prior feature-length film in 2009’s Get Low – and from his IMDb page he appears to have worked hardly at all in Hollywood for most of the last decade. Thankfully, Hanks’s gamble paid off, as there’s no indication on screen that Schneider doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Part of why I’m glad they waited until 2020 to adapt the novel is that effects have advanced to the point that you can really pull off this kind of film. There’s only a single U.S. destroyer left in its World War II configuration – USS Kidd, now a museum ship in Baton Rouge – and though most of the close-up action on the bridge was shot on Kidd, it’s the excellent effects work that sells the movie, whether it’s a wide shot of a sea full of helpless merchant ships or a white-knuckle battle between the destroyer and a sub.

(Listen closely and you’ll hear a nice call-out/Easter egg to USS Kidd.)

I’m glad the book is finally a movie, but I do wish Hanks and company had managed to finish it a year earlier, or had been delayed by a year in finishing it, because as fantastic as Greyhound is, I regret that we aren’t able to see and experience it on the big screen in a theater. An Apple TV+ release is better than no release at all, but the new platform’s limited (albeit growing) membership will mean that a lot of people who might have wanted to see the movie will probably miss out.

And that’s a shame, because they’re missing out on one of the best films of 2020.