I recently rewatched another old favorite of mine and it still holds up as an all-time great cold-war thriller about a cat-and-mouse game between a US intelligence agent, a Russian submarine captain, and the Russian side trying to stop one of their own from defecting. Interestingly, the book it’s based on came out when the Cold War was still a thing but by the time the adaptation came out it was already dated, and yet the movie just works.
It perfectly captures the Cold War though paints people on both sides as rational actors trying to avert the worst excesses of that “cold” conflict and above all from letting it get “hot”. The movie manages to make the audience guess just what is going on and even long after you have figured out what Ramirez wants to do you’re captured by Sean Connery playing him as an enigmatic and competent leader who knows what he is doing but plays the game a bit too close to his chest (though given that he grew up with political apparatus of the Soviet Union that’s no surprise and makes complete sense).
And Alec Baldwin really gives the performance of a lifetime as a likable and competent office worker who rises to the occasion and risks a lot based on his hunches. After that movie, Baldwin was Jack Ryan for me, and none of the sequels based on later Tom Clancy books and with Harrison Ford in the role ever worked for me. Also, after Hunt for Red October and The Cardinal in the Kremlin, Clancy’s work left me uninterested. Those two books were political thrillers that captured the zeitgeist like few others had and his later books, while arguably selling a lot and speculating on newer, more updated threats to the then-present US never had the same impact as those two books.
The Hunt for Red October, the movie, managed to capture that zeitgeist just as perfectly as the book it was based on, despite coming out later when that time seemingly had moved on. But just for a moment, it felt like the perfect time capsule to be transported back to that era when fiery doom from atomic threat felt ever-present and the world was only a step away from falling into that abyss.
The movie captured that everyday existential horror but also the hope for a better tomorrow and so, in a way, was the perfect bridge from the Cold War era to perestroika and a world where global annihilation wasn’t on everyone’s mind all the time.
And rewatching the movie now, even decades later, it still conveys that feeling of hope that people from opposite sides can work toward a common good even if it takes a lot of hard work to come together. But you need some people to make the first step, to trust the other side and hope for human decency despite coming from different cultures. There’s a reason this is a timeless classic, such a great movie with stellar performances and perfect pacing from start to finish.
The Entropy Pump 