The Hunt for Red October

For July, I felt that since I reviewed “Clear and Present Danger” this past President’s Day, I would go and review all of the Jack Ryan film series. Let’s kick things off with one of the best movies ever made, “The Hunt for Red October,” released in 1990.

The movies have one definite way of involving the audience that always succeeds.

They give everyone a character who is right when everyone else is wrong and invite the audience to share his difficulties as he tries to talk some sense into the idiots. In “The Hunt for Red October,” that character is Jack Ryan, the intelligence man who believes he knows the real reason why a rebel Soviet captain is trying to escape with a submarine.

The captain’s name is Ramius, and he is the most respected man in the Soviet underwater navy. He has trained of the other captains in the navy, and now he has been given the authority of an advanced new submarine named Red October – a submarine that uses an innovative drive that is faster than any other ship underwater and almost completely silent. American intelligence finds the Red October as it leaves its Soviet port, but then the submarine all of a sudden disappears. Soon after, the entire Soviet navy moves itself into a deep back-and-forth scenario in the North Atlantic.

The Soviets would like their American equivalents to believe that Ramius is crazy and wants to hide his submarine off the American coast and target its nuclear missiles at New York or Washington. They ask the U.S. Navy to help them find and destroy the Red October. However, Ryan, played by Alec Baldwin, believes that would be a horrible mistake. He tells his boss, an admiral played by James Earl Jones, that Ramius is actually trying to fault and to bring his submarine along with him.

Roger Ebert said in his review, “That is the setup for John McTiernan's film, as it was for Tom Clancy's best-selling novel, and in both cases it is also the starting point for a labyrinthine plot in which, half of the time, we have to guess at the hidden reasons for Ramius' actions. It is a tribute to the movie, which has much less time than Clancy did at book length, that it allows the plot its full complexity and yet is never less than clear to the audience.”

Many military movies, especially those that take place during the Cold War, depend on stereotyping and large, simple motivations to tell their stories. “The Hunt for Red October” has more fun by showing how easily men can be wrong, how false beliefs can seem seductive and how large consequences can sometimes hang on thin.

For example, Ryan’s knowledge of Ramius’ personality where so much depends is based almost completely on one moment where they eat at the same table. Everything else is basically a series of lucky guesses.

McTiernan, who previously made “Predator” and “Die Hard,” showed a type of style and timing in those movies, but what he adds in “The Hunt for Red October” is something of the same isolated intelligence that Clancy had in his novel. Ebert said, “Somehow we feel this is more than a thriller, it's an exercise in military and diplomatic strategy in which the players are all smart enough that we can't take their actions for granted.”

“The Hunt for Red October” has more than a handful of important speaking roles, along with many more cast members who are important for a scene or two. Any film what this many cast members must depend in some way on typecasting. Ebert said, “We couldn't keep the characters straight any other way. What McTiernan does is to typecast without stereotyping.”

Sean Connery makes a believable Ramius, and yet, with his barely hidden Scottish accent, he is far from being a typical movie Soviet.

Ebert said, “Baldwin, as the dogged intelligence officer, has the looks of a leading man, but he dials down his personality. He presents himself as a deck-bound bureaucrat who can't believe he has actually gotten himself into this field exercise.” And Scott Glenn, as the commander of a U.S. submarine that finds itself within yards of the silent Red October, is bender, younger, and has more edge than most of the typical movie captain types.

The production design gives a lot to the movie’s credibility.

Ebert admitted, “'m told that the interiors of submarines in this movie look a good deal more high-tech and glossy than they do in real life - that there would be more grease around on a real sub - and yet, for the movie screen, these subs look properly impressive, with their awesome displays of electronic gadgetry. The movie does not do as good a job of communicating the daily and hourly reality of submarine life as "Das Boot" did, but perhaps that's because we are never trapped and claustrophobic inside a sub for the whole movie.” There are parts with the White House and CIA headquarters in Langley, to the Kremlin and to the ports of ships at sea.

If there’s one part where the movie is really less than impressive, it’s the underwater outer shots. Using models of submarines, the filmmakers have tried to give an impression of these ships moving under the sea. Ebert said, “But the outside of a submarine is not intrinsically photogenic, and what these shots most look like are large, gray, bloated whales seen through dishwater.”

Yet that fall doesn’t matter a lot. “The Hunt for Red October” is a masterful, capable film that involves the audience in the smart and unreliable ploy being done by Ramius and in the best efforts of those on both sides to figure out what he plans to do with his submarine – and how he plans to do it. The movie is made so we can figure that out along with everybody else, and that leaves a lot of surprises for the result, which is really acceptably exciting. Ebert admitted, “There was only one question that bothered me throughout the movie. As one whose basic ideas about submarines come from Cmdr.”

Ebert ended his review by saying, “Edward Beach's classic "Run Silent, Run Deep," in which the onboard oxygen supply was a source of constant concern, I kept asking myself if those Russian sailors should be smoking so much, down there in the depths of the ocean.”

Don’t read this review, go out and see this movie now, it’s a must. You will absolutely love this movie, and I think it’s the best in the Jack Ryan franchise. It has to be seen to be believed.

Look out next week for the next entry in “Jack Ryan Month.”