Submarine Films The Hunt for Red October (1990)
The submarine film is one of the strangest sub-genres in American and European cinema. It is structurally constrained in ways no other action genre is — the protagonists cannot leave their location, the environment is uniform and dark, the antagonists are usually invisible, and the central activity is listening. The Hunt for Red October sits inside a tradition that runs from Run Silent, Run Deep (1958) through Das Boot (1981) and on to Crimson Tide (1995), U-571 (2000), K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), and Black Sea (2014).
The constraints define the form
A submarine film cannot have car chases. It cannot have foot pursuits. It cannot have wide vistas. The crew cannot meet a stranger. The antagonists, if they exist on another submarine, cannot be seen. The genre has historically been forced to invent its own grammar of suspense, almost entirely auditory.
The constraints have produced a remarkably consistent set of tropes across the genre's history: the captain who must make impossible decisions under information starvation; the sonar operator as the audience's surrogate sense organ; the moment of running silent; the depth-charge sequence; the catastrophic flood; the slow rise to periscope depth; the surface-on-the-other-side denouement.
"The submarine film is the most rigorous of action genres because it cannot cheat. You cannot cut to a wide shot of beautiful scenery. You cannot introduce a love interest. You are stuck in a tube under the water with the same fifty men, and the only thing that ever happens is that someone listens carefully and then makes a decision." — David Bordwell, Observations on Film Art (2005)
Das Boot is the genre's Citizen Kane
Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot (1981) is the film against which every later submarine film has been measured. The German U-boat drama, adapted from Lothar-Günther Buchheim's autobiographical novel, ran 149 minutes in its theatrical cut and 293 minutes in its director's cut. Petersen and cinematographer Jost Vacano built a full-scale U-boat replica on a gimbal and shot most of the film handheld, with Vacano running the camera through the cramped corridors at full speed.
The film's central insight — that submarine warfare is a slow accretion of fear punctuated by moments of catastrophic action — became the template for serious submarine cinema. Every honest submarine film made since has been working within or against Das Boot's shadow.
"Das Boot is the only submarine film I rewatched while making Red October. I rewatched it three times. The thing it has that no other submarine film has is patience. Petersen lets you sit in the boat for hours. By the time the depth charges come, you can taste the metal." — John McTiernan, Cinephilia & Beyond (2020)
Run Silent, Run Deep set the American grammar
Robert Wise's Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster, established the American submarine-film grammar that Red October would inherit thirty-two years later: the captain with a mission, the executive officer who questions him, the cat-and-mouse with a Japanese counterpart, the bomb-shell tactical reveal in the second act. The film's central tactic — a "down the throat" torpedo shot that closes the range to deny the enemy time to maneuver — is the structural cousin of Ramius's "turn into the torpedo" maneuver in beat 35 of Red October.
The post-Wise American submarine films of the 1950s and 1960s — The Enemy Below (1957), Up Periscope (1959), On the Beach (1959, partially) — defined the cat-and-mouse pattern that Red October would refine.
Where Red October fits
McTiernan's film is, structurally, an unusual hybrid. It is partly a submarine film in the Das Boot / Run Silent tradition — Crazy Ivans, sonar duels, depth-charge anxieties translated into Soviet sonobuoy attacks. But it is also partly a procedural set on land — Ryan at the CIA, Pelt and Lysenko in diplomatic confrontation, Tyler's research lab. The submarine sequences are spliced into a larger institutional thriller in a way no earlier submarine film attempted.
"Red October is what happens when a director who understands the submarine genre decides to put it inside a Tom Clancy procedural. The submarines are the spine. The procedure is the meat. Earlier submarine films had only the spine." — Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com (2015)
What came after
Crimson Tide (1995, Tony Scott) is the most direct Red October descendant. Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman play executive officer and captain on a U.S. ballistic-missile submarine receiving conflicting orders during a coup in Russia. The film replaces Red October's defection plot with internal mutiny and replaces the cat-and-mouse with a single boat divided against itself. It is a tighter, angrier film than Red October, and arguably the better-made of the two.
K-19: The Widowmaker (2002, Kathryn Bigelow), with Harrison Ford as a Soviet captain dealing with a reactor accident on a 1961 ballistic-missile submarine, is the only post-Red October film to attempt the same scale. It underperformed commercially but contains some of Bigelow's best work.
U-571 (2000, Jonathan Mostow), Black Sea (2014, Kevin Macdonald), and Hunter Killer (2018) are smaller-scale entries. The genre has largely moved to television in the streaming era — Australia's Submarine limited series and the French Le Bureau des Légendes both contain extended submarine sequences that owe more to Das Boot and Red October than to anything else.
"Every submarine film since 1990 is in dialogue with Red October. The genre has not produced a film as completely realized since." — Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central (2018)
What the genre is for
The submarine film exists, ultimately, to dramatize a particular kind of moral pressure: the captain's decision under information starvation. Every submarine film is, in the end, a story about a man who must decide what to do with incomplete information, in a confined space, with the lives of his crew and possibly the lives of millions in his hand. The genre's persistence across seven decades is owed to the durability of that question, not to any particular technological or geopolitical moment.
Red October refines the question by adding a second captain — Ramius — whose decision has already been made before the film begins, and whose certainty is the engine that drives Ryan's parallel uncertainty. Two captains, two decisions, two information sets, and the audience watching them both. That doubling is the structural innovation that made the film what it is.