Hunt for Red October 1990 (2016)

Capt Tom Fargo was better. As you learn from that YouTube video, he went on to run 7th Fleet as an Admiral. The stuff we did while he was CO was important in the Cold War for the security of the US.

I use the "runs home to mama" line a lot when describing an unexpected result from a black box we've integrated into our workflows.

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

I ran into a similar issue when researching Bill Paxton, a computer scientist who worked on the Mother of All Demos. Google's AI told me that he was also known for his roles in Aliens and Titanic, but that's a different person. I told Bill Paxton (the computer scientist) about this and he found it amusing.

yes, I read the book before I got to the boat when I was at nuclear reactor prototype training in Idaho. Read it on the long bus rides back and forth to the site. Yes, it was good and pretty operationally accurate. All the sub lingo etc, is accurate. Some of the actors on the bridge of the Dallas were active duty sub sailors at the time.

In case you didn't know, Tom Clancy has also written a lot of non-fiction military reference material: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy_bibliography#Non-fi...

Bit of a spoiler, don't you think?

Dude... delete that. That’s an important spoiler for a show that just came out a week ago. Yeah, he's in White Lotus S3. That’s all you needed to say.

Arguably RSR vis a vis Ukraine in 2022 is a great primer on just how much the Russian military had decayed from their mid-80s Soviet peak. You can study histories and interviews from the late Cold War about just how much of a bloodbath the NATO militaries expected a Russian invasion of West Germany to be.

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.

RSR is one of my favorite Clancy books, and I return to it quite often. It was the first book I read in my teens with such a descriptive telling of what an attack on an air base could be like. How the attack allowed for the runways still able to be used with "minor" repairs and then reused by the over taking forces. Mike's journey is probably my favorite plot line.

Brilliant novel. I was thinking about it recently. Many years after reading it, I can still remember many of the battle/combat sequences as if I’d seen them on screen. Maybe someone could do a big Band of Brothers type adaptation, given how far along VFX have come.

I mean, aside from the weird civilian rape-to-romance subplot, yeah. Technically it holds up well. Which is true for most of Clancy's novels.

Now watch the uncut version of Das Boot undubbed (5hr8m long).

It's so cool that John McTiernan did it again in The 13th Warrior. A worse movie (not as bad as people say), but I think that one scene is extraordinary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVVURiaVgG8

Agreed. As for the Russian spoken by American actors, my friend, a Russian linguist, said Alec Baldwin’s Russian was fine, but Sean Connery’s was terrible.

I'm trying hard to think of a false or dated moment in the whole movie. If you made a 1984 period film about the same subject, in 2025, I'm not sure what would be different other than the actors. Even the SFX hold up.

That is one of my favorite moments in the film, and maybe in filmmaking generally.

Down Periscope is a definite guilty pleasure.

I've done a submarine day with Red October, Crimson Tide, and U-571

Right. The thing that bugs me about Apollo 13 is that they played up the drama unnecessarily, because the ground crew was so large, well-trained, and in sync. Like the scene where they dump a box of stuff and say "You have to make this go into here using just this?"- the actual story is that one of the engineers on the ground realized basically as soon as he heard about the accident (and the LM lifeboat) that they would need to use the CM scrubbers, and within five minutes of talking to another engineer they had figured it out in principle. The delay was that they wanted to walk through all the steps to make sure their documentation was correct, and the only CM scrubber available was at Kennedy, so they had to wait while it was put on a plane and flown to Houston to mate with the rest of the practice equipment.

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.

> Everything I see and hear about NASA personnel indicates that these people are consummate professionals who stay cool under extreme circumstances

On the whole, they were consummate professionals. And then there is the Apollo 10 turd incident.

It's like the old public swimming pool joke. "Check the pH!" "Hmm, mostly p, not much H."

Yeah, the Typhoon sub was like two submarines side-by-side inside the external shell. The scene in the movie where Alec Baldwin fights the KGB agent between the missile silos ("Some things there don't react well to bullets") couldn't have happened as the missile tubes are between those internal hulls, though one could have argued this sub was built differently with it's "silent drive".

Still an amazing movie.

Diagram here: https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/5f40d7...

If a British tank's tea-making facilities aren't working, it's the same.

Being on a sub is intensely mentally wearing. Months at sea, no interaction with the world outside.

Feeding the sailors lavishly is one of their few perks.

My ship celebrated July 4, 1994 off the coast of Mogadishu by holding a “steel beach picnic” on the flight deck. Everyone ran around under the noon equatorial sun in swimsuits while people grilled burgers, set up little inflatable pools to lounge in, played volleyball and soccer, and otherwise acted like we were at Ocean Beach on a hot day. At night we had fireworks (including rounds from the 5” guns) and the CIWS shot a stream of tracer bullets. It was glorious.

The US Navy spends long hours working hard, but I promise you it plays hard when possible.

It’s real, there are photos from a real tour of a Typhoon submarine

> Adhesion and cohesion always fuck up scenes that combine scale models and water. Splashes always look very wrong

Like the terrible model work in In Harm's Way.

I never had a mental image of Mancuso from reading the book, but Glenn is what was always pictured in my mind in any of the other books he appears. Similar for Jack, I never really got a mental image of Ford or Affleck, it was always closer to Baldwin if not quite Baldwin. Mancuso was just flat out Glenn.

I love Clancy's books too and hate that they ruined his legacy by slapping his name on a whole bunch of books he didn't write at the end there.

Yes of course! I did not mention it since it's so well know.