Danger en haute mer

Yes, I agree it was very predictable, no major surprises anywhere. Pretty sad acting by the majority, very stiff. A few of the good screen shots that I liked had nothing to do with the crew, that is, the submarine underway.

Why the Navy would even allow this to be filmed is beyond me. It portrays nothing positive about either side here. The fact that they thought that this was a plausible scenario amazes me. The number of flashing lights I saw remind me of the old Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea stories.

If you need a military flik to pass a boring Saturday, watch this... at least you don't have to pay attention to it to get the story.

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

Now and again you run across a movie that is so completely unremarkable, that it's hard to find anything to say about it. This is such a movie. An absolutely run of the mill telemovie which tries to tread the same path as 'Crimson Tide', and of course falls ridiculously short, but is still watchable.

A US submarine is cut off from communication with the outside world, when a North Korean nuclear test goes wrong, blanking out most of East Asia because of the electro magnetic pulse. The Executive Officer decides they're at nuclear war (with who is anyone's guess), and takes over the ship, determined to launch their nukes (at who is anyone's guess, as well). The captain and the other good guys have to stop him. It's about as basic as that.

The acting and production values are pretty decent, but it is marred by some pretty silly concepts - such as an officer on board a nuclear submarine in 2001 believing that the USSR still exists. Some of the crews' reactions also seem a bit too undisciplined and far-fetched as well.

I sat through it, whereas I've switched off more illustrious blockbusters ('Blackhawk Down' for instance). I was expecting that it might be rubbish, but it was just plain old ordinary. If it had been a cinema release I might have bagged it, but for a telemovie it's excusable. This one is nudging 5 out of 10.

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.

As a submariner, I have become accustomed to ignoring the technical inaccuracies in submarine movies. It would be impossible to watch them if I let those mistakes bother me. This move was different. Rather than ignoring the inaccuracies, I tried with dogged determination to find one thing that was accurate. From both the Captain and Executive Officer wearing Command at Sea pins above the right pocket, to the unrecognizable Submarine Qualification pins , to the fact hat every Petty Officer on the pier at the submarine base was an aviation rating, to the wrong people barfing out information they couldn't possibly have, to the "you can find me by the radio console" etc. Etc. Etc. The pep talk from the chief to the new sailors was ridiculous. His prediction that two thirds of them won't qualify for a rating and that half of them won't earn their Dolphins is some kind of "elite fighting force" bs that doesn't apply to subs where nearly everyone qualifies. Not one thing was realistic except for the Los Angeles class boat that was featured in the ship's external scenes. The problem is that it is the wrong class boat. Strategic nuclear weapons aren't carried aboard an attack sub. Nope. Not one thing about this movie was even close to realistic.

I could overlook Gene Hackman calling the Chief of the Boat "Mister Cobb" in Crimson Tide. I could forgive Scott Glenn for leaving his billion dollar nuclear submarine to join a boarding party (something no ship captain other than Kirk or Picard would ever do) in Red October.

But this one doesn't just do a lot of things wrong. It doesn't do a single thing right.