The Hunt for Red October (1990)
Directed by John McTiernan
A new technologically-superior Soviet nuclear sub, the Red October, is heading for the U.S. coast under the command of Captain Marko Ramius. The American government thinks Ramius is planning to attack. Lone CIA analyst Jack Ryan has a different idea: he thinks Ramius is planning to defect, but he has only a few hours to find him and prove it - because the entire Russian naval and air commands are trying to find Ramius, too. The hunt is on!
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However, "The Hunt for Red October" is never confused about what it should be, and that's a testament to the longevity of John McTiernan's tight, skilled direction, and the attentive screenplay by Larry Ferguson (who veered way off the cerebral path years later with McTiernan's ill-advised remake of the 1975 James Caan thriller "Rollerball") and Donald Stewart (who went on to write the Jack Ryan films starring Harrison Ford), which is well-aware that viewers are not likely to be all that familiar with what happens onboard a submarine, or tensions between countries.
So because there's nowhere for this Rollerball to go, it's all completely boring and unoriginal car chases -- though McTiernan thinks he can make these exciting by filming one of them entirely in green-goggle night vision, in perhaps the biggest WTF? sequence of the film; the man who made action classics like Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October really should know better -- and, here's a shock: fist fights.
John McTiernan's adaptation of the Tom Clancy novel is a classic submarine movie (yes, it's a subgenre...yuk yuk yuk)—like seafaring predecessors The Enemy Below and The Caine Mutiny, this one's unapologetic about its undiluted testosterone (Gates McFadden of Star Trek: The Next Generation has a blink-and-you'll-miss-her cameo as Jack's Ryan's wife Caroline).
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Visuals
Adapted by Larry Ferguson and Donald Stewart and directed by John McTiernan (Predator, Die Hard), the film mechanically uses the crosscutting technique made famous by Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove without any of its wit or focused energy.
John McTiernan's adaptation of the Tom Clancy novel is a classic submarine movie (yes, it's a subgenre...yuk yuk yuk)—like seafaring predecessors The Enemy Below and The Caine Mutiny, this one's unapologetic about its undiluted testosterone (Gates McFadden of Star Trek: The Next Generation has a blink-and-you'll-miss-her cameo as Jack's Ryan's wife Caroline).
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Valley of the Dolls meets Female Trouble in this all-male semimusical romp.
Like Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind, Connery was too big a star to be trifled with such details as an accurate accent.
That is the reason that you hire John McTiernan to direct your movie, if you are a producer in the late 1980s: having made Predator and Die Hard in successive years, McTiernan immediately established himself as the reigning king of blunt action thrillers that escalated flawlessly from first scene to last.
McTiernan, whose previous films were " Predator " and " Die Hard ," showed a sense of style and timing in those movies, but what he adds in "The Hunt for Red October" is something of the same detached intelligence that Clancy brought to the novel.
"Die Hard" director John McTiernan and cinematographer Jan de Bont have crowded the frame with the candy-colored lights of flashing control boards, dials, sonar screens and digital readouts, and they've given the submarines' cramped quarters a rich, dense texture.
As a director, Mr. McTiernan, who got a lot of mileage out of some unlikely terrorists holding up a Los Angeles office building in ''Die Hard,'' is a hard-working mechanic.
Adapted by Larry Ferguson and Donald Stewart and directed by John McTiernan (Predator, Die Hard), the film mechanically uses the crosscutting technique made famous by Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove without any of its wit or focused energy.
Writers Larry Ferguson and Donald Stewart, a first-rate cast and director John McTiernan, whose signature is sleek action ("Die Hard"), have managed this nicely.
If you'll pardon the pun, there's not much depth to this tale of submarines chasing each other, and at times "Hunt" seems to be little more than "Star Wars" under water.