The Hunt for Red October - Movie Review Example

Many captains have been coached by Ramius, and now, Ramius has gained the charge of Red October – the advanced submarine. Red October is special because it does not make any noise and yet, can be driven faster as compared to all ships under water. The sub vanishes after it has been once detected by the American intelligence upon its departure from the Soviet shipyard. This instigates a serious hide-and-seek game in the region of North Atlantic with the mobilization of the whole Soviet navy.

The Soviets wanted Americans to think of Ramius as a person with lost senses that aims at hiding the Red October and target either Washington or New York for the nuclear missile attacks. Therefore, they seek help from the US Navy in finding and demolishing the Red October, though Ryan does not accede to their proposal because he thinks of it as a blunder. Accordingly, Ryan conveys the approach of Ramius to the superior. In this film, the audience has to make predictions for the underlying causes of actions of Ramius quite often.

The original novel written by Clancy from which the plot of this movie has been derived took a lot of time to develop the complexity of the plot whereas this has been achieved by the movie in much lesser time, even though, the clarity of expression has not been compromised upon. This is one of the strengths of this movie. In order to develop the plot of their stories in the Cold War era, a vast majority of the military thrillers made use of crude motivations and stereotyping. The Hunt for Red October contains a strong element of fun in that it tells that men can very easily go wrong, and that assumptions can be both false and seductive.

Ryan spends too little time with Ramius to gain a rational understanding of his personality. Ryan’s knowledge about the personality of Ramius is based totally upon his meeting with Ramius on the dining table. All of the rest is exaggeration and skilled hunches. The previous movies by McTiernan that include Die Hard and Predator projected both accurate timing and a good sense of style, though in The Hunt for Red October, McTiernan has projected the detached intelligence just like the one that Clancy had inculcated in the novel.

There is much more than mere thrill in the movie. It essentially portrays a military exercise in which each and every action of the players is calculated and is not without a purpose. This movie contains a lot of speaking roles apart from the cast members that were hired only for one or two scenes. Typecasting plays a very important role in any movie with such a large cast. In this movie, McTieman has totally typecast and has not stereotyped. Sean Connery goes perfect with the role of Ramius, and his Scots accent makes him deviate a lot from a typical movie Soviet.

Baldwin looks like a leader, but his character seems dialed down in the persona of a deck-bound bureaucrat who finds it hard to realize that he has entered the field exercise. Scott Glenn is more talented than the conventional movie skippers. A lot of credibility of the movie can be attributed to its production design. Submarines in The Hunt for Red October are much glossier on the inside than what they are in the real life submarines, though the shots of underwater exterior are not at all impressive.

The filmmakers have made use of various submarine models in order to portray the behemoths moving in the sea. Owing to the fact that a submarine’s exterior is not generally photogenic, these shots rather