Since AppleTV won't work on my 2020 Sony TV, I went ahead and signed up using the free trial and watched Greyhound on my PC. It would have been far more rewarding on the big screen or my 85" TV, but I just finished reading The Good Shepard and I wanted to see how they compare.
The book: very good, virtually a manual on sub hunting and detection. The protagonist Captain Krause is a 1950's man, tough and all business. He has doubts and uncertainty but he keeps them to himself. The book does a good job of illustrating how every second matters, how the captain is responsible for not only his ship but the whole convoy and the lives of the men on the other 40 or so ships. Krause has some reflections on his failed marriage but is not a bitter, hard-drinking crybaby trope. He has his duty and that's what matters. He's a man like men used to be. He sustains his watch for over 50 hours, making numerous decisions that prove crucial for the mission of getting the convoy across the Mid-Atlantic gap. I highly recommend this book.
The film follows the tone and structure of the book closely. It begins and within 3 minutes the action starts. A wolfpack is detected on radar and with his limited resources Captain Krause has to decide which contacts to pursue and how much of the convoy to leave unprotected. Tom Hanks plays Krause with very little surface emotion but is successful in convey some of the neophyte convoy leader's underlying emotions. Tom Hanks, ladies and gentlemen. I found the subtextual gay undercurrent between the captain and the sassy mess steward interesting. Few of the other characters are more than faces, cogs in the machine which makes perfect sense in the context of this film.
The U-boats behave realistically. They come to the surface when out of view of the convoy to take advantage of their superior surface speed and maneuverability. The scene in the trailer where the U-boat is slugging it out on the surface is valid, for reasons the movie suggests. There's a bit of Hollywood in some scenes, such as the outsized conning tower logos and seeing four U-boats surface within 100m of each other, done no doubt for dramatic effect. And possibly some scenes were constructed to have the U-boats and convoy appear in the same shots. I found not having lookouts on the bridge odd.
Overall the elements of U-boat warfare of accurate and engrossing. Uncertain radar pips, technical issues, sonar limitations, pillenwerfers, confusion, friendly fire, and simply the physical aspects of escorts, merchants, and U-boats are all very satisfyingly portrayed.
One glaring exception is the intercepted radio transmissions the Greyhound picks up from a taunting U-boat commander. Now sure, there may have been some insane U-boat captains who would use the radio to give away their position solely to taunt the enemy but to howl like a wolf? That's cartoon crazy but fits in with 2020 movie audiences, so ok, whatever.
The movie is structured a lot like the Mad Max movie Fury Road, relentless, hurtling forward. The sound effects and scoring underpin the action. There's a special U-boat sound that seems evil and dastardly every time a boat appears thrusting through the waves.
I would definitely recommend seeing Greyhound, if you can get Apple TV to cooperate with your large screen TV, it's a tense and exciting movie that mostly gets the details spot on.
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U-boat between burning ship and Tom Hanks
U-boat on the surface really close to enemy ships
Desperate grey wolf in a fight with an escort
