| The Hunt for Red October | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | John McTiernan |
| Screenplay by | |
| Based on | The Hunt for Red October byTom Clancy |
| Produced by | Mace Neufeld |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Jan de Bont |
| Edited by | |
| Music by | Basil Poledouris |
Production company | Mace Neufeld Productions |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
Release date |
|
Running time | 135 minutes[1] |
| Country | United States |
| Languages |
|
| Budget | $30 million[2] |
| Box office | $200.5 million |
The Hunt for Red October (alternate on-screen Russian title:Красный октябрь, "Red October") is a 1990 Americansubmarinespythriller film directed byJohn McTiernan, produced byMace Neufeld, and starringSean Connery,Alec Baldwin,Scott Glenn,James Earl Jones, andSam Neill. The film is an adaptation ofTom Clancy's 1984 bestsellingnovel of the same name. It is the first installment of thefilm series featuring the protagonistJack Ryan.
The story is set during the lateCold War era and involves a rogueSoviet naval captain who wishes todefect to theUnited States with his officers and theSoviet Navy's newest and most advancedballistic missile submarine, a fictional improvement on the SovietTyphoon-class submarine. ACIA analyst correctly deduces his motive and must prove his theory before a violent confrontation between theSoviet Red Fleet and theUnited States Navy spirals out of control.
The film was aco-production between the motion picture studiosParamount Pictures, Mace Neufeld Productions, andNina Saxon Film Design. Theatrically, it was commercially distributed by Paramount Pictures and by theParamount Home Video division for home media markets. Following its wide theatrical release, the film was nominated for and won a number of accolades. At the63rd Academy Awards, the film won theAcademy Award for Best Sound Editing, along with nominations forBest Sound Mixing andBest Film Editing. On June 12, 1990, the original soundtrack, composed and conducted byBasil Poledouris, was released byMCA Records.The Hunt for Red October received mostly positive reviews from critics and was the sixth-highest-grossing domestic film of the year, generating $122 million in North America and over $200 million worldwide in box office business.
In November 1984,Soviet submarine captain Marko Ramius is given command ofRed October, a newTyphoon-class ballistic missile submarine with a "caterpillar drive", rendering it nearly undetectable topassive sonar. At sea, Ramius secretly killspolitical officer Ivan Putin and relays false orders to his crew that they are to conduct missile drills off America's east coast. AmericanLos Angeles-class attack submarineUSSDallas, which had been shadowingRed October, loses contact once the sub'scaterpillar drive is engaged.
CIA analyst and former MarineJack Ryan is based in London, but returns to Washington, D.C. After consulting with Vice AdmiralJames Greer, the deputy director of the CIA, Ryan briefs government officials onRed October and the threat it poses. Upon learning that the bulk of theSoviet Navy has been deployed to the Atlantic to find and sink the sub, the military staff conclude that Ramius plans a renegade nuclear strike. Countering this view, Ryan hypothesizes that Ramius, a native-bornLithuanian widower with few remaining personal ties to the Soviet Union, actually plans todefect with the sub, to the United States.National Security Advisor Jeffrey Pelt gives Ryan three days to confirm his theory before the U.S. Navy will be ordered to find and sinkRed October. Ryan sets out to rendezvous with anaircraft carrier in the mid-Atlantic.
An unknown saboteur causesRed October's caterpillar drive to malfunction during risky maneuvers through a narrow undersea canyon. AboardDallas, Petty Officer Ronald "Jonesy" Jones, a sonar technician, discovers a way to detectRed October using hisunderwater acoustics software, and the boat plots an intercept course. After a hazardous mid-ocean transfer, Ryan is able to boardDallas, where he attempts to persuade its captain, Commander Bart Mancuso, to contact Ramius and determine his real intentions.
The Soviet ambassador informs Pelt that Ramius intends to launch a missile attack on the U.S. and asks for help in sinkingRed October. That order is sent to the U.S. fleet, includingDallas, which has reacquired the Soviet sub. Ryan remains convinced that Ramius plans to defect with his officers and finally convinces Mancuso to contact Ramius and offer assistance. Ramius, stunned that the Americans correctly guessed his plan, accepts Mancuso's offer. Ramius then stages a nuclear reactor "emergency", ordering the sub to surface and his crew to abandon ship. After a U.S. frigate is spotted heading right for them, Ramius submerges, leaving his crew in life rafts. Ryan, Mancuso, and Jonesy boardRed October via arescue submarine, at which point Ramius turns over his sub to the Americans and requests asylum for himself and his officers.
Red October is then ambushed byAlfa-class submarineV. K. Konovalov, commanded by Ramius' former student, Captain Tupolev.Konovalov fires uponRed October with a torpedo which Ramius destroys by causing it to impact Red October before it can arm. As the two Soviet subs maneuver, one ofRed October's cooks, Loginov, reveals himself to be the saboteur. He opens fire on the bridge, fatally wounding first officer Vasily Borodin, before retreating to the missile bay, intending to ignite a missile engine and destroy the ship. Loginov is pursued by Ryan and Ramius, and he wounds Ramius before being killed by Ryan. Konovalov launches a second torpedo which is set to arm immediately.Dallas is able to divert toward herself and evade by launchingcountermeasures and conducting anemergency blow to the surface. The torpedo reacquiresRed October but Mancuso maneuvers towards theKonovalov, which the torpedo strikes and destroys. The crew ofRed October, now rescued, witness the submerged explosion from the deck of the U.S. frigate. Unaware of the second Soviet submarine, they believe that Ramius has sacrificed himself and scuttledRed October to avoid being boarded.
Ryan and Ramius, their subterfuge complete, navigateRed October to thePenobscot River in Maine. Ryan, despite his ownfear of flying, falls asleep on a flight home to London next to a teddy bear for his daughter.[3]
In addition, the director's father, John McTiernan Sr., has a credited cameo as one of the attendees at Ryan's briefing for the National Security Advisor.[4]
ProducerMace Neufeld optioned Tom Clancy's novel after readinggalley proofs in February 1985. Although the book became a bestseller, no Hollywood studio was interested because of its content. Neufeld said, "I read some of the reports from the other studios, and the story was too complicated to understand".[5] After a year and a half, he finally got a high-level executive atParamount Pictures to read Clancy's novel and agree to develop it into a film.
Screenwriters Larry Ferguson and Donald Stewart worked on thescreenplay while Neufeld approached theU.S. Navy for approval. They feared top secret information or technology might be revealed. However, several admirals liked Clancy's book and reasoned that the film could do for submariners whatTop Gun did for the Navy's jet fighter pilots.[5] Captain Michael Sherman, director of the Navy's western regional information office in Los Angeles, suggested changes to the script that would present the Navy in a positive light.[6]
The Navy gave the filmmakers access to severalLos Angeles-class submarines, allowing them tophotograph unclassified sections of bothChicago andPortsmouth to use in set and prop design.Louisville was used for the scene in which Baldwin is dropped from a helicopter to the submarine. Key cast and crew members rode along in subs, including Alec Baldwin and Scott Glenn, who took an overnight trip aboardSalt Lake City commanded by then CommanderThomas B. Fargo. Glenn based his portrayal of Commander Bart Mancuso on Fargo.[5]
Some of the principal cast had previous military service which they drew on for their roles. Sean Connery had served in theRoyal Navy, Scott Glenn in theUnited States Marine Corps, and James Earl Jones in theUnited States Army. Baldwin and Glenn spent time on aLos Angeles-class submarine. Baldwin was trained to drive an attack submarine.[7] Some extras portraying theDallas crew were serving submariners, including the pilot of theDSRV, Lt Cmdr George Billy. Submariners from San Diego were cast as extras because it was easier to hire them than to train actors. Crew fromUSS La Jolla, including Lt Mark Draxton, took leave to participate in filming. According to an article inSea Classics, at least two sailors from the Atlantic Fleet-basedDallas took leave and participated in the Pacific Fleet-supported filming. The crew of theHouston called their month-long filming schedule the "Hunt for Red Ops."Houston made more than 40 emergency surfacing "blows" for rehearsal and for the cameras.[5]
The filmmakers' first choice to portray Jack Ryan wasKevin Costner, who turned down the film in order to star in and directDances with Wolves.[8]Harrison Ford was also approached to play Jack Ryan but turned it down; he would later replace Alec Baldwin as Ryan inPatriot Games.[9] Baldwin was approached in December 1988, but was not told for what role.Klaus Maria Brandauer was cast as Soviet sub commander Marko Ramius but quit two weeks into filming due to a prior commitment.[5] The producers faxed the script to Sean Connery, who at first declined because the script seemed implausible in portraying the Soviet Union as an ambitious naval power. He was missing the first page which set the story before Gorbachev's coming to power, when the events of the book would have seemed more plausible.[10] He arrived in L.A. on a Friday and was supposed to start filming on Monday but he requested a day to rehearse.[11] Principal photography began on April 3, 1989, with a $30 million budget.[11] The Navy lent the film crew theHouston,Enterprise, two frigates (Wadsworth andReuben James), helicopters, and a dry-dock crew.[6]
FilmmakerJohn Milius revised some of the film's script, writing a few speeches for Sean Connery and all of his Russian dialogue.[12] He was asked to rewrite the whole film but was only required to do the Russian sequences.[13] Rather than choosing between the realism of Russian dialog with subtitles, or the audience-friendly use of English (with or without Russian accents), the filmmakers compromised with a deliberate conceit. The film begins with the actors speaking Russian with English subtitles. But in an early scene, actorPeter Firth casually switches in mid-sentence to speaking in English on the word "Armageddon", which is the same spoken word in both languages. After that point, all the Soviets' dialogue is communicated in English. Connery continued using his native Scottish accent for the rest of the motion picture. Only towards the climax of the film, at the beginning of the scene in which the Soviet and American submariners meet, do some of the actors speak in Russian again.
Filming in submarines was impractical. Instead, five soundstages on the Paramount backlot were used. Two 50-square-foot (4.6 m2)[verification needed] platforms housing mock-ups ofRed October andDallas were built, standing on hydraulic gimbals that simulated the sub's movements. Connery recalled, "It was very claustrophobic. There were 62 people in a very confined space, 45 feet (14 m) above the stage floor. It got very hot on the sets, and I'm also prone to sea sickness. The set would tilt to 45 degrees. Very disturbing." The veteran actor shot for four weeks and the rest of the production shot for additional months on location inPort Angeles, Washington and the waters off Los Angeles.[6] Scenes of a shipyard inPatuxent, Maryland were filmed at asubmarine base inPoint Loma, San Diego.[14]
Made before the extensive use ofCGI became the norm in filmmaking, the film's opening sequence featured a long pull-out reveal of the immense titular Typhoon-class sub. It included a nearly full-scale, above-the-water-line mockup of the sub, constructed from two barges welded together. Each country's submarine had its own background color: Soviet submarines, such asRed October andV.K. Konovalov, had interiors in black with chrome trim. American ships, such asDallas andEnterprise, had grey interiors. Early filming was aboardReuben James in the area of theJuan de Fuca Strait andPuget Sound in March 1989. The ship operated out ofU.S. Coast Guard Station Port Angeles. TheSH-60B detachment from the Battlecats of HSL-43 operated out ofNAS Whidbey Island, after being displaced by the film crew. Most underwater scenes were filmed using smoke with a model sub connected to 12 cables, giving precise, smooth control for turns. Computer effects, in their infancy, created bubbles and other effects such as particulates in the water.[15]
By March 1990, just before the film's theatrical release, theSoviet Parliament removed theCommunist Party from government, effectively ending the Cold War. Set during this period, there were concerns that with its end, the film would be irrelevant but Neufeld felt that it "never really represented a major problem". To compensate for the change in the Soviet Union's political climate, an on-screen crawl appears at the beginning of the film stating that it takes place in 1984 during the Cold War. Tony Seiniger designed the film's poster and drew inspiration from Soviet poster art, using bold red, white and black graphics. According to him, the whole ad campaign was designed to have a "techno-suspense quality to it". The idea was to play up the thriller aspects and downplay the political elements.[11]
The film caused a minor sensation in the black projects submarine warfare technology community.[16][17] In one scene, where USSDallas is chasingRed October through the submarine canyon, the crew can be heard calling out that they have various "milligal anomalies". This essentially revealed the use ofgravimetry as a method of silent navigation in US submarines (though this method of navigation had been explained as the navigation method ofRed October in the book six years earlier). Thought to be a billion dollarblack project, the development of a full-tensorgravity gradiometer byBell Aerospace was a classified technology at the time. It was thought to be deployed on only a fewOhio-class submarines after it was first developed in 1973. Bell Aerospace later sold the technology to Bell Geospace for oil exploration purposes.[18] The lastTyphoon-class submarine was officially laid down in 1986, under the nameTK-210, but according to sources was never finished and scrapped in 1990.[19]
| The Hunt for Red October: Music from the Motion Picture | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Film score by | ||||
| Released | June 12, 1990 | |||
| Length | 29:48 | |||
| Label | MCA Records | |||
| Jack Ryan soundtrack chronology | ||||
| ||||
The musical score ofThe Hunt for Red October was composed and conducted byBasil Poledouris and performed by theHollywood Studio Symphony. A soundtrack album composed of ten melodies was released on June 12, 1990.[20] The album is missing some of the musical moments present in the film, including the scene where the crew ofRed October sings theSoviet national hymn. The soundtrack is limited due to the fact that it was originally compiled to fit theCompact Cassette. Later, it was remastered for theCD. An expanded version was released in late 2013 byIntrada Records. It features 40 additional minutes of the score, including the until-then-unreleased end titles.[21]
A standardVHS release debuted on October 25, 1990; followed by another VHS in widescreen on September 10, 1996.[22]
For the 30th anniversary commemoration,Paramount Home Entertainment released a 4K Steelbook + Blu-ray+Digital version of the film.[23]
The Hunt for Red October opened in 1,225 theaters on March 2, 1990, grossing $17 million on its opening weekend, more than half its budget. The film opened at number one at the U.S. box office and remained there for three weeks.[2] Its opening was the 20th biggest weekend of all time and the biggest non-summer, non-Thanksgiving weekend to date.[24]
The film went on to gross $122,012,643 inNorth America with a worldwide total of $200,512,643.[2]
OnRotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 88% based on 76 reviews, with an average rating of 7.70/10. The site's consensus states: "Perfectly cast and packed with suspense,The Hunt for Red October is an old-fashioned submarine thriller with plenty of firepower to spare."[25] OnMetacritic, it has aweighted average score of 58 out of 100 based on 17 critics, indicating "mixed or average views".[26] Audiences polled byCinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.[27]
Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four, calling it "a skillful, efficient film that involves us in the clever and deceptive game being played",[28] whileGene Siskel commented on the film's technical achievement and Baldwin's convincing portrayal of Jack Ryan. Nick Schager, forSlant magazine's review, noted, "The Hunt for Red October is a thrilling edge-of-your-seat trifle that has admirably withstood the test of time".[29] In contrast,Newsweek'sDavid Ansen wrote, "But it's at the gut level thatRed October disappoints. This smoother, impressively mounted machine is curiously ungripping. Like an overfilled kettle, it takes far too long to come to a boil".[30] In a review forThe New York Times,Vincent Canby noted that "the characters, like the lethal hardware, are simply functions of the plot, which in this case seems to be a lot more complex than it really is."[31]
In a review forRolling Stone, Peter Travers criticized the film and wrote: "LikeTop Gun before it,Hunt is tub thumping for a strong defense capability. If the plodding exposition doesn’t get you first, the propaganda will. The only sensible reaction can be summed up in one word: Mayday."[32]
The Hunt for Red October was nominated and won several awards in 1991. In addition, the film was also nominated forAFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills.[33]
| Award | Category | Nominee | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 199163rd Academy Awards[34] | Best Film Editing | Dennis Virkler, John Wright | Nominated |
| Best Sound | Richard Bryce Goodman, Richard Overton, Kevin F. Cleary, Don J. Bassman | Nominated | |
| Best Sound Effects Editing | Cecelia Hall,George Watters II | Won | |
| 199144th British Academy Film Awards | Best Actor | Sean Connery | Nominated |
| Best Production Design | Terence Marsh | Nominated | |
| Best Sound | Cecelia Hall, George Watters II, Richard Bryce Goodman, Don J. Bassman | Nominated | |
| 1991BMI Film Music Awards | BMI Film Music Award | Basil Poledouris | Won |
| 1991Motion Picture Sound Editors Awards | Best Sound Editing – ADR | ———— | Won |
we did want to make sure we did all the ripple effects and distortions and get those added in as computer graphics.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
