Bigger would admit much more light for film
[1]: https://www.quora.com/Did-the-Typhoon-class-of-submarine-rea...
Look at this footage. Look at the guys on the helo deck. When russian sailors have time off, they take it seriously.
The US Navy spends long hours working hard, but I promise you it plays hard when possible.
They military also spends a lot on making sure that they are very well fed - as much as they can be under the circumstances:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a147643...
Feeding the sailors lavishly is one of their few perks.
Still an amazing movie.
Diagram here: https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/5f40d7...
One of the crew members' memoir (Эдуард Овечкин "Акулы из стали") mentions that the pool was filled with freshwater. The crew rarely used the pool themselves, because they could find better use for that much water. The author had an interesting story about this swimming pool. One day, a high-ranking officer came with inspection. He was very rude and the crew didn't like him in return, especially since he sat in the captain's chair (only the captain was supposed to sit there). Then this officer wanted to take a swim and he ordered the crew to prepare a pool. As the author was drawing water, he and other crew members decided to urinate in the pool. And then watched as this officer was swimming there, barely containing the laughter. When they finally told the captain about this in control room some time later, the submarine was sailing without control for several minutes, because everyone was laughing on the floor.
In hindsight, they catched a brief window in recent history where a western film crew would be allowed on board of a Russian ballistic missile submarine – remember that 2001 was the year when Putin gave a speech in the German parliament (in German language!) speculating about a new common safety architecture eventually succeeding NATO.
Although in the days since “O Brother Where Art Thou?”, when they added dust-yellow color to the entire movie in post, maybe there are other ways now, if you didn’t want to go entirely to CGI.
Like the terrible model work in In Harm's Way.
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2024/10/28/the-hunt-for-red-oct...
I had little expectations toward that movie (I think it was just randomly airing on the TV and I watched it), but was very pleasantly surprised.
I'm a fan of Clancy's books (and movies based on them), and The Wolf's Call could easily be one of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_frigate_Storozhevoy
"Gregory D. Young was the first Westerner to investigate the mutiny as part of his 1982 master's thesis Mutiny on Storozhevoy: A Case Study of Dissent in the Soviet Navy. One of 37 copies of Young's thesis was placed in the Nimitz Library of the United States Naval Academy where it was read by Tom Clancy, then an insurance salesman, who used it as inspiration to write The Hunt for Red October."
When The Soviets Hunted Down Their Own Warship https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkBQl7YRI3E
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0pnlLzhW4c1v-vKUWRWXZBD4...
Great article.
Overheard every few sprints…
That scene is how most Monday mornings feel as I start to process my inbox. Including dropping the cup of tea all over myself and immediately needing a meeting with my superiors.
Actor Scott Glenn, who plays the Captain of Dallas, modeled his character after our Captain, Tom Fargo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rjO_VrESNo
It is a great movie!
Terrific character. I just love the competency and leadership. Hopefully your Cpt. Fargo was just as good.
My favorite exchange from the movie is when Jonesy brings his report to the captain. He's aware of how crazy this theory sounds, especially when his very serious and hard-to-read captain rephrases it back to him. Jonesy starts getting nervous and fumbling and Mancuso cuts him off -- "Relax, Jonesy. You sold me." Not quite sure why that simple line hits so hard.
I love the "You sold me" line too, as it shows how Mancuso is willing to listen to his men even when they have such an out of the box idea. It also helps make Mancuso listening to Jack's port/starboard Crazy Ivan maneuver. He's kind of already bought into Jack's idea by that point anyways. Otherwise, he'd already had Jack into quarters somewhere
pass
1) Christian Marclay's The Clock
2) Sátántangó
3) Dekalog
you must be blessed with a very high level of masochism to want to read subtitles for 5 hours
It depends I think on whether the Big Trouble in Little China fans are still asleep.
Edit: I think the box office was terrible
That scene is one of my faves.
It was also the first adult book I read. Probably around 6 or 7? Before Jurassic Park, which I read before that movie came out.
I'd asked my father if "There were books about other things, because kids books were boring."
He handed me Tom Clancy off his bookshelf.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Naval_Institut...
I don't know exactly how to describe it, but the sub force just has a different temperament than the surface fleet.
Of course, all of that went out the window when people in the movie started yelling at each other. From that point on it's a fictional scenario contrived to create a dramatic story.
Same with Apollo 13. Everything I see and hear about NASA personnel indicates that these people are consummate professionals who stay cool under extreme circumstances... but that wouldn't make for a good movie.
I should probably note that this is coming from the perspective of someone who grew up with a father who was an career enlisted man (CPO/EM-N) stationed mostly on boomers.
Similarly, the "oh we forgot the moon rocks!" bit was actually the engineers realizing it ahead of time and changing the prep checklist to account for it, rather than a last second dash. This was only because there were so many engineers, and they had made themselves so immersed in the task, and they had such good lines of communication that someone identified the problem and was able to escalate the fix to the correct levels at the appropriate time. This didn't happen by accident, but was the result of years of working together, both training and the experience of actual flights that made these teams so good.
Separately, there were a few things the movie got wrong just as one-off moments. At launch the arms retracted simultaneously, rather than sequentially as shown in the movie (not quite as cool looking) and if you listen to the bit where Lovell says "Houston, check my math here" he is doing addition, which can't be done on a slide rule.
I still love that scene where it cuts to everyone whipping out their slide rules. It just adds to the mystique of we put men on the moon with such antiquated tech compared to modern standards (even of those available in the 90s when the movie was made).
They do seem to get the adding machines more or less correct.
That said, as a retired NASA contractor, I can say that Apollo 13 is highly respected at NASA. Hidden Figures has a lot of fans there, too. In spite of the horrible physics, Gravity also has its fans - some astronauts said it really captured the feeling of being in space.
On the whole, they were consummate professionals. And then there is the Apollo 10 turd incident.
The USAF A-10 fleet was expected to have been wiped out in approximately 2-3 weeks of fighting based on expected loss rates, and nuclear escalation was not outside the realm of possibility.
What the Ukrainians managed to do in 2022 was impressive, full stop. But to understand what that reveals about the Russians, you also need to understand that the Ukrainians are essentially a JV military as opposed to the US, a NATO force, or someone like the Australians, Japanese, or South Koreans. The bravery is there, but they just don't have the same ability to integrate the details at scale such as fires, logistics, and large-scale joint operations, because they're still trying to shake off their Soviet past.
Whereas although the Soviets would have similar problems that come from being an authoritarian military, NATO would have been fighting them AND the entire Warsaw Pact (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland et al). The Soviets wouldn't have had 30+ years of Russian societal decay and would have had the advantage of sheer mass.
Welllll. I saw posted here last week (cannot find it now), that the US helped them with the logistics and recon a lot more than was previously known. Like, "Shoot your artillery here at this time, and you'll like what happens. If you don't like it, we'll work harder to make you happy."
The reason the US and Western militaries could utterly crush an opponent in places like Iraq is due to having not just cool gear, but a culture that promotes excellence in execution. Junior folks who can excel at small-unit tactics, and senior folks who have learned how to operate and orchestrate the large-scale machine over a 20-30 year career.
They spent 8 years overhauling their military and learning from invited western forces to prepare for an invasion that they hoping beyond all would never come. And it paid off in spades.
*With the full benefit of hindsight*, most experts that I have read seem to agree that (ignoring nuclear weapons and staying completely conventional) the Russians were as a whole stronger on land in Europe than the west up until the mid-1970s, when western technological advancements started to remove the numbers advantages and were hard for the economically stagnating communist countries to keep up with. By the mid 1980s, the only real direct advantage the soviets had was a closer supply line than the bulk of NATO's power, which was the USA.
There are records showing the shock that Soviet military experts had at the effectiveness of the western stealth and jamming equipment that was used in the 1991 Gulf War (that was waged right at the tail end of the USSR's existence). It's much more regarded now that had a full blown NATO/Warsaw pact conflict occurred in the 1980s, the Soviets would have likely lost had they not effectively destroyed NATO's air power early on, though to be fair most experts in the west weren't as sure just how effective their kit would end up being.
Even taking air power out of the equation, the armoured kill ratios would have favoured NATO if it was even 1/4 the ratio it was against the Iraqis. Again here, the only advantage the Soviets would have had was if they got complete surprise before NATO could mobilise.
> NATO would have been fighting them AND the entire Warsaw Pact (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland et al).
There are mixed signals in the archives we have access to about how well (or more accurately reliable) a good chunk of the Warsaw Pact would have been if the cold war turned hot. Half the Red Army's presence in these countries was to threaten them and keep a lid on any revolutions that cropped up (as they did inCzechoslovakia and Hungary as hard violent examples, and Poland in the early 1980s as a soft one). It was very nebulous with Romania in particular that it would participate in anything other than an full "unprovoked attack" from NATO.
> The Soviets wouldn't have had 30+ years of Russian societal decay and would have had the advantage of sheer mass.
There was already decay by the 1980s. Corruption was rife in the Soviet army, especially during and after the Afghanistan conflict. There are many documented cases of Soviet officers in Europe selling fuel earmarked for the army to local civilians, among other things. Many also participated with opium smuggling from Afghanistan to Europe as Soviet officers had some freedom to move around western parts of Germany unmolested, in particular West Berlin.
> There are mixed signals in the archives we have access to about how well (or more accurately reliable) a good chunk of the Warsaw Pact would have been if the cold war turned hot.
Are there any decent books on this? Not because I'm doubting you, just because it would be a good read.
I'm a voracious consumer of cold war history so I've read things from all over the place.
I don't have direct sources handy, but for (expected) Warsaw pact reliability, it varied a lot by country. I'm not saying they wouldn't have fought (the full time core communist regime soldiers probably would have), but in a war that expands into conscription sucking in more of their people is where the will to fight "for the soviets" became more tenuous. By the 1980s most eastern block citizens knew life was better in the west and local revolutions may have had varying degrees of success, especially further in the south (again this is in hindsight, but the sudden speed of communism's collapse in Europe really caught everybody off guard about how fragile it all was especially without the threat or ability for the Soviets to put it down).
For the technological gaps, most of the good content is in either defence-related publications, historical or geopolitical think-tank pieces, or postgraduate academic writings (where you often go down the rabbit hole of looking up citations). It can be dry reading unless you're really into it.
Some more accessible examples about soviet reactions the success of the 1991 Gulf War:
This report by the US DoD highlights a lot of the Soviet denial and excuses early on in the conflict, not accepting that it could be so easy (the iraqis were using old equipment! They were badly trained!). If you read between the lines, there was a lot of doublespeak from official Soviet channels about it, but scroll down to the conclusion you'll see a lot more tactic admisions of capability gaps:
https://community.apan.org/cfs-file/__key/telligent-evolutio...
This one has a lot more content via internal Soviet thinking. Look at page 9 under "The Revolution in Warfare and Desert Storm" for Electronic Warfare notes:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA242543.pdf
This Chicago Tribune article references Russian attitudes via "a translated report":
https://web.archive.org/web/20240910225432/https://www.chica...
This publication "Russia's Air Power at the Crossroads" from the mid 1990s is often cited, too:
really really do not want to be part of Russia again. that's what I take away from it. they like being independent and are willing to fight this hard to stay that way. I can only imagine their utter disappointment with the outcome of the US election.
but to your point, it does say a whole helluva lot about the inabilities of the Russians too. The fact they are using NK troops and now reports of Chinese soldiers too says just as much. Like, is Russia reserving its soliders on the Western front for NATO reasons rather than just using everything against Ukraine? Or are they using the why fight with your own soldiers when you can use someone else's like why fund your own startup when you can use someone else's money
The Russian government is treading a fine line domestically. For most Russians, the war is a not relevant to them. They do not want to fight, which is why when it became clear Russia wasn't going to have a quick victory, there was one quick and dirty mobilization that mostly sucked up people from the outer regions, in particular ethnic minorities. Russia is also dealing with acute labour shortages because of a variety of factors, including bad demographics, at least a million people leaving the country, and demand from arms manufacturers. This is why you hear about military contracts being as high as 50x the average yearly salary.
This is why there are North Koreans fighting; there was already a program that essentially sends North Koreans to work in parts of Russia as essentially slave labour that the NK govn't gets the money for. This was just an extension of that, with the added bonus for the North Koreans that they will get their first exposure to combat in decades. There are probably a few hundred Chinese soldiers (as well as people from a host of other countries) that are in it for the money, too.
The only thing that will remove Russia as a credible threat is breaking its economy and/or aligning security guarantees with its neighbors to preclude invasion.
NATO makes use of rail, but also has LOTS of varied mobility for delivery of logistics.
In this way, NATO can shut down an invasion by RU by attacking the rail system, with both conventional and cyber weapons.
The only counterexamples I can find are where the RU contractors do large scale ware for junta/warlords like in Syria and multiple countries in the Sahara. But they aren’t fighting a large modern army there — mostly insurgencies and militias.
I think Clancy was misunderstanding his audience in believing he needed to add rape to all the other bad things, trivializing rape, and probably most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, insisting on a superfluous romance subplot in a techno-thriller. Its been a long time since I read Red Storm Rising, and the main thing I recall is that I hated the romance subplot. It was a human interest story when I picked it up for the guns and bombs and missiles and things.
I've done a submarine day with Red October, Crimson Tide, and U-571
[1]
- The Hunt for Red October (1990)
- Patriot Games (1992)
- Clear and Present Danger (1994)
- The Sum of All Fears (2002)Sam Neill we always love (Connery's XO; "I would like to have seen Montana"), and Scott Glenn (Mancuso, captain of the Dallas) rarely disappoints. We also get a late appearance by Richard Jordan (would would die only a few years later) and an early one by Courtney Vance as the Dallas' sonar tech. Stellan Skarsgard is Tupolev, the Soviet sub captain who pursues Connery. Jeffrey Jones, mostly of note to our generation as the principal in Ferris Bueller, has a small role as the former Navy intelligence man Skip Tyler. And there's a blink-and-you-miss-it role for Gates "Beverly Crusher" McFadden as Ryan's wife in the early moments of the film.
It was only on a relatively recent viewing that we noticed one of the Red October's minor officers was played by an actor we'd recently seen on TV. On THE AMERICANS one of the main Soviet characters is a man named Burov who eventually rotates back to the USSR to work in the same government ministry as his father. His father is played by Boris Krutonog, who 30 years before played Slavin -- his big moment is denouncing the political officer as a "pig" at the tense dinner scene early on.
I never know how film-nerdy people are, so I'll also note that Red October was directed by John McTiernan, who also directed the original Predator, Die Hard, The Last Action Hero, Die Hard with a Vengence, and the 1999 Thomas Crown remake. Unfortunately he did some deeply shady shit around one of his films and ended up in some significant legal trouble that basically blew up his career, but the films he made in the 20th century basically all hold up pretty dang well. The sense of momentum you get in October is present in Die Hard and in Crown as well.
Second favorite was the mad barking which was supposed to be Japanese in Rising Sun.
I can't vouch for the military accuracy, but can say that the drama and intensity is one of best i've seen.
At the time of this movie, I was working as a software engineer for a defense contractor building combat control systems for submarines. When it was released, the company took the entire department, including former Navy submarine officers now project/program managers to a private viewing. There were definitely groans when some things on the sub were inaccurate, but given the level of hands-on knowledge and expertise in the audience, it was very well received.
They have done two episodes on this movie:
https://jamellebouie.net/unclear-and-present-danger/2021/10/...
https://jamellebouie.net/unclear-and-present-danger/2022/10/...
Richard Edlund’s team’s work on various films of the 80s was impeccable (including Ghostbusters, Die Hard, Big Trouble in Little China, and more). They were the inheritor of the crown of high quality 65mm VFX after Douglas Trumbull quit the business (the pinnacle of his work being films like Blade Runner and Brainstorm).
I have to wonder what was wrong that caused the last minute switch to ILM!
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