The Hunt for Red October

Submarine strategies with Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin and Scott Glenn

Just before Gorbachevs rise to power in the USSR, a notable naval commander (Connery) takes a technologically advanced submarine on its maiden voyage to conduct missile drills off of America's east coast. Something happens to draw the ire of the Soviet brass while a CIA analyst (Baldwin) believes the captain might be defecting. James Earl Jones, Sam Neill and Courtney B Vance are on hand.

Based on the 1984 Tom Clancy novel, The Hunt for Red October (1990) is a well-done Cold War thriller and the first of currently five movies involving the character of Jack Ryan. The next two are Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994) featuring Harrison Ford i...

When British intelligence sends some photographs to CIA analyst "Jack Ryan" (Alec Baldwin) he immediately races to his boss (James Earl Jones) with what seems like a fantastic tale about a submarine that uses a hydro-dynamic drive. That renders it almost silent to traditional sonar and therefore a threat to NATO. Next thing we know, the Soviet's have mobilised their Atlantic fleet and it occurs to "Ryan" that they could have a defection on their hands. He now has to convince his sceptical superiors that this isn't just a wild goose chase, and that "Ramius" (Sean Connery) has a plan to bring his state of the art warship to the USA. Meantime, onboard the "Red October" we discover a complex plan that will test the mettle of the crew - officers...

"The Hunt for Red October" is an extremely well paced film throughout and it never leaves us in any doubt that Jack Ryan's assumptions about captain Marko Ramius are unfailingly correct and if anything could have sapped the interest and made this nothing more than an overlong and water logged exercise in boredom then this is it, so it is amazing this never actually happens and indeed the opposite just happens to be true. The film also features a wonderfully tense game of cat and mouse through the briny depths as the submarines Konovalov and Red October track each other and it provides a very satisfying conclusion to captain Viktor Tupolev's pursuit of Ramius in which Ramius outsmarts the other captain with fatal results for his opponent.