The Hunt for Red October
A Tom Clancy novel directed by John McTiernan. I’m surprised more shit doesn’t blow up. It’s as batshit insane as The Sum of All Fears, but this is a better film.
Gruff Russkie Sub Captain Duncan MacTavish (it’s an elderly Sean Connery, he’s not gonna mask his Scottish accent) wants to defect to the US, for unexplained reasons, along nearly all his trusted officers. Only a doctor is against it, but he’s easily routed around.
On the USA side, hoping to keep the sub intact so that the Americans can copy the superior Soviet tech is our boy Jack Ryan, author avatar. But he is married with children here, I don’t understand the timeline of Tom Clancy’s books.
The first order of business for Gruff Russkie Sub Captain Bruce Flanaghan is to kill the sub’s political officer, a lad called Putin, which he does flawlessly. In the end he even mentions revolutions, and then kills Putin. Sadface.
Anyway, since he has the top rated sub of the fleet, he makes a run for it. Only his most loyal disciple has the chops to keep up, someone who might be fleshed out in the novel, but here is just a cackling maniac, which would require a Peter Stormare to stand out.
In the meantime, Jack Ryan goes to a high level political meeting and trash talks a higher up, getting away with it since he has political cover from above (just like the last time). He is taken to the nearest sub and shepherds the captain to parlay with the Russkies.
Since all the officers are in on the ruse, a fake nuclear warning is sounded and the crew is pushed out to a rescue boat. Both sub captains meet using a midget-sub for rendezvous.
Out of the blue (ocean) appears the pupil and he wants blood (for no explained reason), so a fat enormous nuclear sub gives a reach around to a fast sub killer. Whatever floats their boat… There’s a also a saboteur cook who almost blows up the boat, until our boy Ryan kills him.
I don’t understand who sent that saboteur. If the higher ups knew he was defecting, why let him take the best ship in the fleet? Makes no sense.
Anyway, killing the other sub provides cover for the sub being destroyed, so they take it to some Maine river for dismantling. The Russkie are defeated, even though this was released after the Berlin Wall had already fell. Not the sharpest torpedo in the tube, this Clancy guy.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.