Below : Help with other submarine movies to watch?

Help with other submarine movies to watch?

Watched 3 submarine movies this weekend. K-19:The Widowmaker, Below, and U-571. Liked them all.

I was wondering what was everyone's favorite submarine movie ever?

And are there any recent submarine movies that I may have missed that you could recommend?

Thanks for any help.

Re: Help with other submarine movies to watch?

Das Boot, it'll make you feel sorry for ever liking those 3 movies.

Re: Help with other submarine movies to watch?

Crimson Tide, Run Silent Run Deep? There's a couple of very good films for you.

Having said that, lmzf is right - Das Boot is an absolute cracker of a film.

Re: Help with other submarine movies to watch?

I really enjoy "The Hunt for Red October".

Re: Help with other submarine movies to watch?

Das Boot all the way. Thought I was going to have a heart attack during its sonar scenes.

Re: Help with other submarine movies to watch?

Just to add to the Das Boot posts, if you want the best version go for the mini series not the director's cut; the latter is more of an edited highlights than a diffinitve version.

Re: Help with other submarine movies to watch?

I remember watching Das Boot the mini series in Germany a very long time ago. It was very impressive.

I don't see the mini series on Netflix or Amazon. Where do I get it?

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Re: Help with other submarine movies to watch?

Das Boot and The Enemy Below.

Re: Help with other submarine movies to watch?

Well, I'm going to go with the others on Das Boot of course.

Also some good classics that are worth watching...

The Cruel Sea, not in a submarine but showing the convoy escorts at work. Very good film in my opinion.
Above us the waves, about the sinking of the Tirpitz. Classic John Mills war film.
The enemy below also very good.
On the beach, bit of a different one here.

Also check out www.uboat.net they have a submarine films page which may interest you.

Last but not least I positively refuse to watch U-571 on account of ridiculous inaccuracy.

Hope this helps.

Re: Help with other submarine movies to watch?

DAS BOOT
RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP
OPERATION PACIFIC
OPERATION PETTICOAT
DESTINATION TOKYO
CRASH DIVE
UP PERISCOPE
ENEMY BELOW
LORELEI: WITCH OF THE PACIFIC
HELL AND HIGH WATER
BEDFORD INCIDENT
TORPEDO RUN

Re: Help with other submarine movies to watch?

Another good one is Gray Lady Down

Re: Help with other submarine movies to watch?

I agree, Gray Lady Down is a really good sub movie. Good actors too.

Re: Help with other submarine movies to watch?

Well, the best answer to this question is to start by pointing out that no one has ever made a perfect submarine movie. As a former nuclear ballistic missile submariner who also has always had a fascination with World War II fleet boats (i.e., US submarines), the fact is that every submarine movie ever made seems to have had some major problem with it, regardless of its good points. Thus, what you really have to focus on are the good points, unless they are so wanting that the movie is what we aboard boomers used to call, "dogsh*tters." CRIMSOM TIDE is a dogsh*tter of the first order. Pure TDU ("Trash Disposal Unit") fodder. Hokiest thing imaginable. A total waste of great actors, too.

DAS BOOT is the best in most respects, except that the hangdog attitude that the officers wind up displaying as the film goes on has always struck me as very hard to believe. Absent more personal research into German submariners' memoirs of their activities which might conceivably reveal a factual basis for that, I will remain skeptical.

ICE STATION ZEBRA has a lot of good points, even if it is basically classic light-weight Hollywood entertainment. (****SPOILER ALERT****) The casualty in the torpedo room (apart from a lot of nonsensical B.S. about what caused it) is not badly rendered at all, considering. I liked the the run-up to that where they looked for a lead in the ice through which to surface, too. GRAY LADY DOWN, on the other hand, which I first saw on TV only shortly after my own first patrol, I thought utterly sucked.

RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP is a very well made movie that works so well as a movie that it makes even a submariner forget how utterly unrealistic it generally is. Basically the same thing can be said of HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. I bought copies of both.

UP PERISCOPE is a favorite, especially since I first became interested in submarines by the book it is based on at the age of nine (and in spite of the fact they deviated substantially from the original plot). James Garner and Edmond O'Brien both did a nice job with their parts. Unfortunately, it demonstrates much less in the way of submarine operations than a typical submarine movie usually does.

OPERATION PETTICOAT is one of my favorite movies of all time of any genre, and is a lot of fun without doing as much violence to the realities of submarine operations in WWII as you would assume (I suggest you read my review here on IMDB re the same). Submarine operations in real life are always spiced up in a significant way with a fair dose of some of the best real-life humor you'll ever encounter, and at least some of the humor in this film was inspired by true events.

OPERATION PACIFIC is chock-full of hokey melodramatics (as is DESTINATION TOKYO, to some extent) but at least it portrays, however unrealistically, an almost fair cross-section of US Pacific Fleet submarine operations during the war: guerrilla support, hunting Japanese warships, and lifeguarding for air raids; even the "Great Torpedo Fiasco" (which in real life should have been treated as a full-fledged scandal complete with Congressional investigation) is portrayed; ironically, however, the submarines' principal mission, the sinking of 55% of all the Japanese cargo & personnel shipping destroyed during the war, is totally ignored.

TORPEDO RUN was poor. So, I seem to recall, was CRASH DIVE. HELLCATS OF THE NAVY is best watched only because it is not only the only movie I know of featuring an introduction by the real Fleet Admiral Chest Nimitz, CINCPAC during almost the entire the war and former submariner himself, but it is also the only movie in which both future President of the United States Ronald Reagan and future First Lady Nancy Davis appeared together (this latter aspect was very scary to watch for the first time in the year 1981.) Unfortunately, these kinds of films represented the typical sort grade-B entertainment that submarine movies came to gain a low reputation for.

U-571 was pretty forgettable. The stiff performances and hokey dramatics don't reflect accurately on what it is like to be aboard a submarine.

ENEMY BELOW and THE BEDFORD INCIDENT (along with the spooky ON THE BEACH (original version) are worth seeing though not necessarily especially realistic, as is the much more realistic THE CRUEL SEA which, however, portrays submarines only from the point of view of submarine hunters on the surface.

If you have any more questions, just ask. :)

Re: Help with other submarine movies to watch?

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned this one yet, but I thought "Hostile Waters" with Rutger Hauer was way better than K-19:The Russian Accent Maker. It's an HBO-made film from the mid-90's, and had far more suspense and drama then K-19. It's finally available on DVD, and very affordably. Well worth the effort.

TDG

Re: Help with other submarine movies to watch?

I'd have to agree Hostile Waters was awesome and a true story, except America won't admit it nor how the submarine involved suddenly gained a huge dent in it's sail on the day the incident 'supposedly' took place.



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