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In Reply to: Anyone see "K-19" ? posted by mikenyc on July 20, 2002 at 06:14:51:
. . . lets see if I can give it a review based on the previews I've seen.Harrison Ford is horribly miscast in the role of the Russian Submarine Captain. His ludicrous accent varies in intensity throughout the entire film. Liam Neeson as a political officer on the vessel as an observer gets into staring contests with Ford over points of authority. The tight quarters and darkness puntuated with red light makes atmosphere of the film claustrophobic and filled with tension. At some point the sub goes too deep and everyone sweats and looks around wildly as it creaks and groans. Oh, will they ever survive? Nuclear war is averted at the last possible second. The nobel captian dies, but saves his men.
Does anyone else think that submarine flicks are the most boring and predictable genre in movies?
Follow Ups:
has about the most realistic...in terms of physical depiction of a submarine interior...sets of any sub movie.I was a bubblehead for 10 years, and believe me life on one of those black tubes is every bit as claustorphobic as the better films show it to be.
Rob
dado5, Please share with us, how these films, depict what it's
"really" like, and also, how you appreciate, or take exception to, how these dramas go "over the top".
First and foremost, most films have unrealistic sets. Hunt for Red October stands out as one of the worst. The Con (thats the main control room where the Officer of the Deck dirves the boat) on the Dallas looks nothing like the one on HRO. They simply do not look as high tech as most films show. And they are certainly not as spacious.
I think the deliberate "closed-in-ness" of films like Run Silent and Das Boat is accurate. You are never more than 10 feet or so from an outside wall on a boat.I can't comment on the drama of survival as I was never on a boat that was in jeopardy, but the general level of excitement during drills was more than enough for me.
A slice of real submarine life:
- about 110 men go to sea on a modern nuke boat.
-18 hour days; 6 hours on watch 12 off. In those off hours you eat, sleep and otherwise keep busy.
-Drills are run twice each day, morning and afternoon watches. So if you just got off the mid watch, good luck sleeping. The specific nature of the drills are always unknown to the active watchstanders, so as to simulate actual emergencies.
- You shower once every two to three days. Your working division is on a rotation and assigne a time of day to shower. Again, good luck if you happen to be on watch at this time.
-On all boats but the big Tridents (Ohio class), enlisted men rated E-5 and below share beds. This is called hotracking. Usually three men to two bunks, with each man on a differnt watch (remember 3 6 hour watches make up a workday.). Cooks and Medics get their
own bunks for hygine reasons. Officers are usually two to a stateroom, with the CO & XO having their own cabins. On bigger boats sometimes the Navigator, Chief Engineer and Weapons officer have private digs as well. Usually makeshift berthing is set up in other spaces such as torpedo rooms and missle compartments.- Fresh food lasts about the first week of a deployment. From there it is powdered and canned down to the last days of the run where it is often ravioli, potato balls and brussel sprouts for all three meals.
-The air is beyond foul. You get used to it wihtin a day or two, but once you get off the boat and into fresh air, your oder becomes very apparent.
-You have got to be a diplomat as you have no way of avoiding anyone you have a run in with. Grudges make for long trips.
-In port you work regular 8 hour work days with a rotating 24 hour duty. Usually you have duty every 3rd or 4th day and you stay on the boat the full 24 hours, usually standing sentry watches or roving security patrols on the boat and/or pier.
-you are expected to know the boat inside out. There is a formal qualification for this, after completion of which, you are a certified submariner (pronounced sub-mair-iner, not sub-marine-er)and get to where the famous "Dolphin" pin on your uniform. This takes about a year.
-I was a nuclear reactor operator, so i missed out on all the 'gee-whiz' stuff that goes on up front. But when requests from the Con for rapid speed changes came in, we knew we were either dogging or being dogged. We would get the details from the forward guys off watch.
So back to the movies.
I noticed a unique change in the mid 90's. The language used in most movies was a joke. But after 94 or so it became very accurate. The commands bantered about on Crimson Tide were spot on. The missle commands they used were the real thing (although agian the sets were a bit grandiose). This stuff used to be hush-hush, so I guess alot of it was declassified after the cold war.
Man I could go on and on. Throw me any specific questions and I will be gald to answer them.
Thanks,
Rob
Neeson's quite tall and I'll bet he doesn't run around the sub all hunched over. I laughed at all the room in the sub of U-571. Give me Das Boot any day (or SCTV's parody Das Boobs) and Assault on a Queen should be remade with Guy Pearce.
Man,yer a hardass.
YECH
Sure, the best film in the genre because of it's grittyness and it's un-cliche characters. That sense of impending doom that appears in all sub flicks actually paid off in Das Boot, a rarity. It had a very European downbeat ending. Comparing Das Boot to K19 is like comparing John Wayne's "Green Berets" to "Saving Private Ryan".
Let's see..."Das Boot", ""Run Silent, Run Deep", "Destination Tokyo",
"Hunt for Red October", "Operation Pacific", "Crash Dive", "On The Beach", "Enemy Below", "The Bedford Incident"...which only showed
a periscope during the whole film, "Hell and High Water", "Crimson Tide"...to name just a few.The genre, is one, that you can't really screw up, unless you try, and really hard. It's story elements are basic, and in and of themselves, create compelling, constantly interesting drama, by just saying the word "submarine".
Which only leaves one other area, open, for screwing up...casting.
It goes to show, a "Harrison Ford", does not a film, solely, make for entertaining viewing.
I wonder how nervous George Lucas is now, just in the "planning" stage for Indiana Jones 4 ? I would be, if I were him !
Red October, is way underrated....But, of course, Das Boot, is much more realistic, in a way...that it is not made in hollywood..
But then I like being wrapped in Saran Wrap and beatin about my testicles with a wiffle ball bat.
And I enjoyed most of those movies you mentioned.But what seperates Das Boot from those is the gritty realism of Das Boot.Which if you knew anything about submarine warfare,which I doubt,you would realize.
YECH aka Lance Romance
Everything is predictable, isn't it ?With any film, it's timing, and now is not the time to do this film...and...this isn't a "Harrison Ford" film.
I'm sure that some thinking, however superficial, went into "why" to make this film, it's just, even, experienced people can't predict, what's going to happen, outside of wanting to just make a "Harrison Ford" film.
There are rules about making a "Harrison Ford" film, and they just added one to it, when they released this film, and it bombed...kind of.
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