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Just a quick note that this film really holds up, like weirdly well given its subject and vintage. If you haven't watched it in a long time, add it to your list.
A good Sunday afternoon pairs The Hunt for Red October and Down Periscope
I've done a submarine day with Red October, Crimson Tide, and U-571
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One of the interesting things about the movie was how well they conveyed the mood and atmosphere on subs. 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…
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 wo…
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).
Just a quick note that this film really holds up, like weirdly well given its subject and vintage. If you haven't watched it in a long time, add it to your list.
The trick they use to handle the transition from Russian to English dialogue is so cool.
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> 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. * 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…
> 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). > 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…
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:
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Similarly the Clancy book Red Storm Rising really holds up well, and weirdly may be one of the best primers on Russian military practices, culture, and capabilities as the force was constituted during the first year of their full scale invasion of Ukraine.
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.
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Watched it again recently — still great. Alec Baldwin is a great Jack Ryan. It's such different role than what he's become known for since.
Now watch the uncut version of Das Boot undubbed (5hr8m long).
It's interesting that ILM went with a smoke chamber to shoot the underwater scenes in this film. It was probably a lot easier than shooting underwater and less likely to screw up the models. Some of the time this method looks fantastic but, at other times, it looks like a model in a room full of smoke. I've always found the underwater model scenes shot for Das Boot[1] to be more convincing. [1] https://theasc.com/art…
Adhesion and cohesion always fuck up scenes that combine scale models and water. Splashes always look very wrong, and in the case of a submersible bubbles could be a problem. Smoke chamber makes sense. 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.
This man bought the prop recently https://cowboystatedaily.com/2024/10/28/the-hunt-for-red-oct...
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Watched it again recently — still great. Alec Baldwin is a great Jack Ryan. It's such different role than what he's become known for since.
Now watch the uncut version of Das Boot undubbed (5hr8m long).
you must be blessed with a very high level of masochism to want to read subtitles for 5 hours