Danger Beneath the Sea

Well I lasted 3 minutes of this movie. After seeing the crew were wearing RN dauphins NOT USN ones. I realized further watching would only be more frustrating trying to pretend it wasn't a SciFi movie. Anyone who thinks was "authentic" has never had any contact with the USN or seen ANYTHING about the USN submarine service. It's too bad because there are some good actors. No excuse for this F up though.

A sorry copy of "Crimson Tide" in my opinion. As each part of the film developed I just new what was going to happen next. Casper Van Dein has not been in anything nearly as good as "Starship Troopers" and it pains me to see him in this. The acting is wooden, the story predicable, give it a miss.

Dave

This is Crimson Tide. They used a clever trick to hide their misdeed: they replaced most mentions of "Russia" with "North Korea" and switched the roles between the captain and the first officer. Cunning little ones. Some scenes appear to be directly lifted from Crimson Tide and recreated shot-for-shot.

That is, the "penny dreadful" version of Crimson Tide. How did they manage to make it so much worse?

Well, the addition of a stockpile of corny dialogue helped. The characters aren't much short of just uttering "OMG, it's that deadly pass, the captain is so brave and ingenious and we nearly hit that wreck like, I could touch it, like!"

As did the pointless manicheanism. The whole point of Crimson Tide was that all aboard were taking what they thought was the right course of action and that a nuclear conflict nearly arose because the US Navi protocols were inadequate. In this movie, it's hammered home quite clearly that the first officer and his men are just your usual "baddies". Their motivations are just nefarious.

And let's not forget the pointless "action" scenes and their accompanying clichés. We're not even spared the terrible "oh! The gun fired between them! Who's dead, is it the baddie or the good guy? Lookie, it's the baddie!" scene. That was never an interesting scene, why do bad movies insist on reusing it ad nauseam?

Don't watch this, watch Crimson Tide. Partly because it's objectively better in all respects (writing, acting, directing, effects) and partly because there's no reason to endorse blatant plagiarism.

Crimson Tide did it better.Conflict aboard an American submarine which loses contact with the rest of the world owing to a nuclear accident in North Korea.Skipper Caspar Van Diem urges caution,gung-ho second in command Shane Daley leads mutiny.Teeth are gritted,jaws are tightened ,testosterone pumps,cliches abound and after too long an interval the credits roll Makes Sub Down look good Pity because I rate Van Diem a lot but he seems stuck in TV and DTV purgatory

It wasn't bad for about the first half but it got so completely ridiculous I had to bail. The inciting incident is pretty ballsy for a TV film.

But would a sub's Captain and XO really go out on the sail to see it a nuke exploded a couple miles away? And as dumb as that was, would they really develop strong radiation sickness so quickly? And the captain is given a shot of iodine because of radiation acute radiation sickness and five minutes later he is fine. That's Star Trek medicine, not reality, unless that iodine was laced with amphetamines.

Could an American navy sub really have so many scheming nutters on board? That would be rather terrifying.

There are comparisons to Crimson Tide, but to some degree, submarine movies tend to be very similar because of the nature of subs. And there was a famous Soviet sub incident in the Cuban Missile Crisis where the officers differed sharply on whether to use a nuclear torpedo.

The great thing about Crimson Tide was both sides had a fairly plausible argument. Though, granted, at least to my civilian understanding, the captain there could not relieve the XO for refusing to launch regardless of the XO's reasoning. That's the whole point of the two man rule.

But it all seemed somewhat reasonable. In this film, you have scheming nutters and officers easily swayed by nutters. And one of the nutters believes the USSR still exists. Silly silly silly. Also, the stakes here are much less than those in Crimson Tide. If indeed WWIII has broken out, they are just one boat of many others, in addition to all the other nukes in the US arsenal. They are in most practical terms pretty much irrelevant.