The Hunt for Red October

DB

3 hours ago

3 min read

Featuring a Scotsman playing a Lithuanian in charge of a Soviet submarine - good times!

MOVIES

The Hunt for Red October

Movie summary: Moscow, Washington D.C. and a CIA Analyst track a rogue Soviet Captain and his new submarine. (IMDb)

I said I'd write about The Hunt for Red October a few weeks ago and then forgot, so have watched it yet again to make sure I still felt the same.

It's also a strange movie to watch while working my way through The Americans - maybe the real world is getting a little too close to the Cold War and MAD for my liking.

Regardless, The Hunt for Red October is a bloody good movie filled with fantastic performances which more than make up for when the movie skips through certain sequences a little too quickly for their own good.

To be fair, the film is trying to fit in a hell of a lot of story while keeping the focus on the characters, so there was going to be a trade-off somewhere to prevent the film being ludicrously long - and it's still 135mins!

I could list all the cast who impress in keeping you interested in what's going on (Alec Baldwin, Sam Neill and James Earl Jones for starters) but there's a reason why Sean Connery's face is on all the posters.

Connery is incredible as Captain Marko Ramius, bringing gravitas, authority, a fierce intellect and charisma by the bucketload to the role - it's really not hard at all to see why so many of his men love him so much, and why so many of the officers are prepared to follow him on his dangerous odyssey.

Despite the heavy focus on character work, there's still time for multiple engaging, interesting and unique submarine action moments that are still just as gripping to watch today as they were back when I first saw the film in the Nineties.

And just think: this was the third in director John McTiernan's 'trilogy', following Predator and Die Hard - Red October isn't quite on the same level as those two, but close enough for it to not really matter.

Do I really need to state that this is a definite recommended watch from me? I've seen it twice in the space of a few weeks and didn't even come close to thinking I was wasting my time with that second watch.

The Hunt for Red October's greatest achievement is balancing the stripped-down story by boosting the character work, casting the perfect actors for each role, having a fantastic score and being paced to near perfection - go watch it.

The Hunt for Red October is a great film that I will happily watch any time - it does have a lot to get through, so things do feel a little too convenient at times, but those moments don't spoil the movie's overall quality. [9/10]