John McTiernan has evidently experienced quite the few legal … issues in recent years, but for a brief period he was King of the Hollywood Blockbuster, and The Hunt for Red October (1990) his last action heroics (see what I did there?).
Alec Baldwin is the nominal protagonist but he’s more of a link between Sean Connery and Scott Glenn, the two submarine commanders spending most of the movie in a gripping cat-and-mouse underwater showdown. It does what these movies are meant to do – the claustrophobia and tension, the crew in-fighting, but it also has a geopolitical dimension which now doesn’t appear to be merely of its time.
I first saw the Wolfgang Peterson stunner (1981) in April 2000, purchasing the VHS tape with The Phantom Menace (1999) in HMV, Princes Street. I had no idea what it was about but the movie was £4.99 and Empire magazine called it scintillating in a retrospective. The writer wasn’t wrong, unlike their four-star review of the Jar Jar Binks fiasco.
The movie works within the most claustrophobic milieu of pre-Nuclear warfare. It was apolitical, much like the Kriegsmarine’s attempts to portray themselves after the conflict, this despite them nonchalantly torpedoing ship after ship.
This reboot more expansively amplifies upon the rampant extremism of the submariners, their appropriation of ideology as an alternative to the Allies’ eventual superior resources and sound tactics. There are also thriller elements, La Rochelle, home of the U-boat pens, the backdrop to French Resistance efforts to disrupt the German occupation. This place also has a special meaning for me: on a French exchange trip the police chased us around the town centre because one of our party set off a firework in a gift shop. Ah, the memories.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 