submarine movies!

ive actually only seen the last six but i included others so the film nerds wouldnt get all up in arms

i think "ice station zebra" is one of the all-time greatest titles

I haven't seen any but Das Boot and The Hunt for Red October. Not a genre that does much for me.

also, Yellow Submarine and Hello Down There

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/20000leaguesposter.jpg

yeah, sorry, corny science fiction movies dont count, this is a poll for movies about real men doing manly things packed tight inside a metal tube

'above us the waves' yo

ok, Hello Down There is mostly an underwater-house movie, but at least has real men represented by Tony Randall and young Richard Dreyfuss

'we dive at dawn'

"The Enemy Below" is pretty good, and contains a lot of the tropes that show up in the later movies, esp. the non-political German U-boat crews of "Das Boot," and the cat-and-mouse trickery of "Red October."

Voted for "Red October" just because Alec Baldwin was a better Jack Ryan than Ford or lol Affleck.

also missing: The Abyss

"corny science fiction" max movie

you forgot down periscope lol

This is a genre that fascinates me, I think, in part, because I have a dread of both drowning and being confined in a small space (and maybe dying, trapped there). A number of these films have a scene where crewmen up on deck have to make a swift return into the submarine because of a sudden need to submerge, and one man always gets trapped and drowns because they have to close the hatch before he has time to get through. That, and scenes where submarines are blown apart by depth charges dropped by surface ships play to those fears (which I suppose a lot of people must have).

My vote is for 'Das Boot', although I remember enjoying 'Run Silent, Run Deep' as well.

ditto, probably my favourite sub-genre.

there's another film that deals with the sinking of the tirpitz (same as 'above us the waves') - submarine x-1, which is worth catching on ch4 matinees.

also search "morning departure" which is everything dubmill hates (mills and attenborough too)

"Gray Lady Down" with Charlton Heston ("stow that crap, sailor!") and David "Kung Fu" Carradine

As my dad's career was in submarines you can guess these hold a certain place in the family's heart. My dad was chief of staff to the admiral at Point Loma's sub base where the filming of Red October was done in part (not at the base but offshore), so that one's a favorite -- my dad and his buddies were pleased that the film did a reasonably good job at getting a sub's absolutely compact internal architecture across, though more so with the Russian subs than the American ones. Also Scott Glenn and Courtney Vance's characters on the American sub were absolutely spot on portrayals of American sub sailors in my experience, something about the combination of intense professionalism and easygoing humor, though Glenn was of course far more wound up -- my dad says Glenn shadowed one of the sub captains on the base for a bit during filming to get a sense of how he carried himself and it comes across; thing is that Glenn's work also reminds me of my dad a bit too! I think it's more a general comment on how Navy sub captains are in general, there's a certain consistency even in personality, which is a holdover from the Rickover years I suspect.

That all said, the absolute family favorite for now and ever -- Das Boot. I remember my dad already had the novel that it was based on and his copy was pretty well worn so he must have been reading that thing fairly regularly or else sharing it out with folks. When that got the American theatrical release I don't think any submariner talked about anything else for months, and when my parents got their first DVD player my dad's first purchase was the full miniseries edition.

still haven't seen Das Boot

A number of these films have a scene where crewmen up on deck have to make a swift return into the submarine because of a sudden need to submerge, and one man always gets trapped and drowns because they have to close the hatch before he has time to get through.

^^^ yeah this. Also: *ping*

*ping*

"If your intention is to defect..."

KRAZY IVAN!!!

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

http://www.pidpads.com/USERIMAGES/WrathOfKhan.jpg

Aargh! How could you forget the undeniably awesome Sphere?

Das Boot fwiw.

wrath of khan is one of the all time great naval warfare movies no lie

imo~

there is a great ww2 sub movie called 'below' that was directed by david twohy and is really spooky and well done, but it's probably a little too lol unrealistic

cankles and and what OTM

wrath of khan is one of the all time great naval warfare movies no lie

No question. Nick Meyer goes on in the commentary for the DVD about how he really wanted to emphasize that aspect and I think it did the whole set up of the Star Trek universe a world of good.

Das Boot is going to win by far, but there's a spectacular number of movies missing from the list.

Where are... Destination Tokyo, Crash Drive, Torpedo Alley, Hell And High Water (a Richard Widmark movie that actually takes place above a submarine instead of The Bedford Incident where the submarine is off camera).

For that matter, you could included The Spy Who Loved Me.

Also, the cable movie about the Hunley (think it starred Donald Sutherland) should be included. It was pretty good!

Anyway, this site to thread: http://submarinemovies.com/

ET, max is one of these Millennials who gets the bends if there are too many b&w movies

oh go away all of you

i was just going to do everything btw. das boot & widowmaker but i wanted to include ice station zebra

Okay the fact that there is actually a submarinemovies.com makes me happy. There really is a place for everything on the Net.

ooh, i forgot abt the 49th parallel... not really a sub movie imo since most of it is just niggas strollin thru canada

what about that one fraisier movie

w/o the xtra i

I'm sure I've mentioned this elsewhere, but my dad was in the merchant marines during WWII - working the North Atlantic circuit (NYC, Southhampton, Azores, Havana, Florida) from 1939-1941 smack in the middle of the Battle Of The Atlantic. He was torpedoed twice: the first time he and the rest of the crew were picked up by a nearby convoy member, but the second time he was stuck in a lifeboat for ten days before a coast guard PBY picked them up.

After that, he had enough of the Atlantic and moved out west in 1942. He had a couple days leave before his first SF-Honolulu run - so he and a friend of his picked up a couple of girls and took off to Yosemite for the weekend. They were late getting back (he hinted that they had a heck of a weekend) to SF and missed the departure, but as it turned out the freighter was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sank with all hands. He came back to Ithaca after that, and that's where he met my mom.

Not surprisingly , we probably saw Das Boot in the theater at least four or five times.

U-571 should be disqualified under the "corny science fiction" rule for the sheer number of historical errors, anachronisms, and goofs.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0141926/goofs

Also it's just a crap movie.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

obvious result really.

would've liked to have seen anything even vaguely black and white get a single vote though.

i started watching Crimson Tide last night for the first time in ~15 years, it's so much fun. young steve zahn, young viggo mortenson, not that young james gandolfini, people yelling at each other on a submarine, what more can you ask for?

all the foreshadowing is heavy as a bag of hammers but it only me makes me excited for the part where people start yelling at each other on a submarine.

Following up on my post upthread... I've been sorting through things at my mom's house and a couple weeks ago ran across a stack of papers relating to my dad's time in the Merchant Marine during World War 2. Turns out I had the order of events completely screwed up (my dad passed away 25 years ago), but with so much documentation now available on the net, I put his name into a Google alert. Last week it paid off and I found a detailed letter he wrote to one of the crew members who went down with the ship:
http://www.quartzcity.net/2014/06/23/my-dad-and-the-sinking-of-the-s-s-illinois/

wow

double wow. thanks for sharing that, elvis.

ARRGH... "to the parents of one of the crew members"

yeah, that's the one. As he is someone who charges passengers to go in his sub, he said billionaires are giving free rides to scientists in their leisure submersibles as a tax fiddle and putting the likes of him out of business. The committee kept telling him to stfu and answer the questions!

committee: "please stick to the topic and answer the question!"
k.stanley [shouting]: "m-o-u-s-e-t-r-a-a-a-a-p!"

https://www.moceanartphotography.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/16-Idabel02-1170x563.jpg

tbf on the lad, his sub is a lovely piece of design - Cousteau would have approved.

Reminds me of

https://www.benzilla.com/uploads/2009/03/tintin.jpg

he's a much more credible and sympathetic character than Rush. He's not from money and was trying build subs in his parents NJ backyard since a teenager. More of a sense of someone captivated by the romance of the deep and pursuing their obsession, rather than an old money brat backed by venture capital. He learned how to weld when he was 15 so he could build his own subs.

octonauts feel with spongebob characteristics

I honestly thought it was designed after the Minions franchise and I haven't even seen the films

had stockton rush paid closer attention to animation trends he'd be among us still

like with Titan it's an uncertified submersible (you need very deep pockets for that shit), but it stays within its max operational depth of around 2000ft so nobody gets atomised. And the hull is constructed from approved materials. Crazy old ideas like that, also it has an opening/closing hatch on the top. Nothing more disconcerting than getting bolted shut into a sarcophagus of doom.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/27/us/former-oceangate-employee-titan-submersible-hearing/index.html

Former OceanGate employee Matthew McCoy testified Friday that at a lunch meeting in September 2017, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush told him that if he ran into any issues with the US Coast Guard ahead of the Titan expedition, Rush “would buy a congressman” and make the problems “go away.”

McCoy, a former Coast Guard member who was in the US Coast Guard Reserve at the time, brought up safety and regulatory concerns about the expedition at the meeting which Rush said they would get past by going through the Bahamas and launching out of Canada.

“The conversation basically ended when he, after explaining that the Coast Guard had tried to shut him down, down in California, and that he wouldn’t operate there anymore, but that if the Coast Guard became a problem, that he would buy himself a congressman and make it go away,” McCoy said during the final day of the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation’s hearing.

“Mr. McCoy, is that a direct quote?” asked Jason Neubauer, the chair of the Coast Guard’s Marine Board investigation that is reviewing the cause of the Titan’s implosion.

“He said, ‘I would buy a congressman’ and make, basically, the problems would go away at that point in time,” McCoy said. “That will stand in my mind for the rest of time. I’ve never had anybody say that to me directly, and I was aghast and basically, after that, I resigned from the company.”

having a cool name made this guy so overconfident

that was the only "bombshell" moment in the last two days of the hearing which have all been about tedious marine regs, though I guess it's hardly surprising that an entitled rich prick claims he can buy a congressman to make troublesome laws disappear for them. I think he was deliberately provoking the guy and wanted him to leave the company, after it becoming obvious to him that it wouldn't work because the guy was asking too many pertinent questions about wtf kind of operation it was.

One of the other witnesses a couple of days ago who was a bright, opinionated young contractor and who started asking too many questions about their lousy, dysfunctional sub-tracking system and called it out as a load of crap. She was slapped down by Mrs Rush and told she wasn't being enough of a "solutions based person".

there was an old tech guy who worked with the rtm system, talking about why he left Oceangate. He was an old skinny guy, who looked frailer than his years, possibly in his mid 60's. When Rush decided to tow Titan out rather than stationed on the deck, he said the expectation was that he'd have to do all his hours of maintenance work on the Titan while it was bobbing about on the dodgy platform it was being towed on, under all the worst conditions the N Atlantic can throw at you. You can see why the company was by the end, mainly staffed by young incompetents.

i think trying to run Oceangate like a disruptive startup with a staff of youthful eager careerists ignores the fact that the ocean itself is merciless and can't be fooled by the subterfuge of dodging maritime rules and regulations

Something something about old age and treachery defeating youth and agility every time, with the North Atlantic being the old one here.

something something velvet paw something something remorseless fang something something would not willingly remember

i'm hunting for a blog essay called something like "we all live in a carbon-fiber submersible" (as handily accurate do-you-see metaphor for the state of politics in 2023)

does anyone remember it? eds zitron or niedermeyer seemed v plausible but but if it is one of them i can't find it. i checked with max read but he said it wasn't him (and he didn't remember it either)

or did i just dream it? was it like just a tweet linking to someone's essay (and i've confused the microblog gag with the title once you clicked thru to the long-form version?)

*ps while googling i did find a brendan o'neill spectator column titled "the shameful condemnation of the titan five" lol

it was ed niedermeyer, i guess i should have googled submarine not submersible #ffs:
https://niedermeyer.online/2023/06/23/we-all-live-in-a-carbon-fiber-submarine/

I never really knew the difference until after that crazy little deep sea soup-maker imploded, now I could probably hold a reasonable convo with a professional saturation diver!

i think the only real problem with its design was that it couldn't hold enough billionaires. a carbon fiber submersible with several dozen billionaires on board would work just fine. my heart knows this to be true

other suggestions for vainglorious explorer club millionaires/adventure seeking billionaires: hydrogen filled zeppelins, one way space missions, uncharted cave diving ..

the funniest thing about Stockton Rush is when he emphasised that the carbon fiber hull was actually the best, most perfectly engineered part of his sub. He said everything else is bells and whistles, once you've got the hull sorted ... it's a lock!

might watch Last Breath tonight, saturation diving is almost as dangerous as carbon fiber hulls

i will happily read and watch stuff abt mountaineering and exploration in the icy realms even when i know everyone dies horribly -- but will totally avoid anything to do with scuba diving in a covered space or potholing (the nutty putty diagrams sometimes circulate as a meme and i just cant)

this thread demonstrates that i make an exception for the diving of flimsy micro-subs

the tourist submarine (named "Sindbad") accident in Egypt is not surprising in the least. They have a terrible safety record with tourist dive boat deaths already. Three major accidents with multiple fatalities in the last year I think and major H+S issues flagged up in each incident. If you were aware of this you might think twice about getting into a submarine there, jfc. It sounds like all 6 fatalities were Russian citizens.

"will totally avoid anything to do with scuba diving in a covered space or potholing"

lol, stopped watching Last Breath even before it got to the bit where everything goes tits up. It was already more than moderately anxiety-inducing viewing as it was.

oh ffs. Have tried to watch this again tonight. The stricken diver lying hundreds of meters under the north sea with counter going off with: seconds since he last breathed oxygen ticking away. oh ffs

a corny movie, but jfc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUeOpqBhjDg

ominous low frequency boom permeates right into the steel interior of the Polar Prince from below.

"what was that thing?"

ah don't worry, it'll be reet!

Thanks Calz. I’ve been fascinated by this too and I love whenever you bump this thread.

documentary on bbc2 on tuesday

some had previously said the implosion would have easily been audible from the Polar Prince. It's slightly a case of are you going to trust your senses in that situation or is the kool-aid still working and you think the sub is a fine construction, or just go into the outright denial stage and pretend you never heard it.

oh thanks, koogs. I never heard of that one. I thought it was just netflix who had one coming.

Competing docs, just like Fyre Festival (vv appropriate)

some vital context I forgot to add is that the woman in the video who commented on that boom noise was Wendy Rush. She was responsible for all comms between the sub and mothership and also running roughshod over any minions who had the audacity to question how haphazard and unsafe their operation was.

"what was that bang?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unexplained_sounds

brb just going to add the Kasabian discography to that Wiki page

We shall all submit to The Hum

Watched that doc on bbc2. It explained that because the speed of the acoustic modem Titan used for comms was so slow, and a former contractor had previously complained to Wendy that it was a garbage unreliable not fit for purpose system only to be told by her that she lacked "explorer spirit". In that clip Wendy hears the subsonic boom of her husband getting mushed and then a few seconds later after the sub is no more, the last "dropped 2 weights" message is received, reassuring her that the innocuous noise was nothing to worry about. kind of a poetic justice moment for the arrogant old money parasite really, lol.

oh! i forgot to watch this (instead i was watching THE FLY, 1986 -- which seems appropriate somehow, seth brundle has "explorer spirit")

there isn't much new in it really, I think that standout clip is pretty much the only bit that backs up the claims at the start of the program of "unprecedented access to the coastguard inquiry".

What strikes me about the whole thing is that there had been generations of research and trial-and-error in the realm of deep sea exploration which accumulated wisdom like “your craft has to be be spherical in order to evenly distribute the pressure” and “carbon fiber is no good for this sort of thing because it degrades over time and can catastrophically fail” and Stockton Rush in his quest to prove them all wrong of course proved the accumulated wisdom and best practices right.

I’m starting to think about a certain Mars colony fetishist who owns a rocket company who is also ignoring decades of research and best practices and wisdom and I’m hoping he takes paid passengers soon.

that test dive in the Caribbean with the loud gunshot noises emanating from the hull. The one which passenger Karl Stanley described as was likely an incident within a few very small percentage points of an actual deep sea implosion. That was the moment where any sane person would have given up on such a ridiculous idea. Or at least it would have frightened them off from ever getting into that lemon ever again.

instead he was like "that's just the sound of the wrinkles being smoothed out!"

(ok this is a joke but i think it's based on something he actually said about the noises)

i mean to be fair the wrinkles *were* smoothed out (along with everything else)

there was an amusing clip of Rush reassuring a potential mission specialist that all submersibles make loud noises in deep sea, it's just industry standard shit, honest m8

another of his dubious excuses was that it wasn't the hull making the noise, it was the frame shifting

"it's just the building settling"

Pretty sure he thought it was just akin to the submersible cracking its knuckles.

I would love to hear him saying in that quick talking snake oil seller fashion of his, after the Titan had been struck by lightening in the Bahamas. That this was actually a good thing that would bake the carbon fiber into a much tougher composite hull than it previously had been.

Right, it's like that charred wood technique that makes the wood stronger and more fire-resistant.