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I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE SEEN MONTANA IN HIGH
DEFINITION
the hunt for red october
The
re-release of Red October is, at best, marginally better
than its original slapper. A brand new transfer clearly and
obviously made from the same telecine as the THX Laserdisc, the
reissue fails miserably at giving this fine film the dignity and
respect it deserves. The film suffers, painfully, from a lack of
resolution, a clear indicator that the telecine was not a new
high-definition print prepared for DVD's ultra high resolution
but the same ol' print made for the murky Wal-Mart crowd's $8.99
VHS rack. This is painful, demoralizing hack work. Which now
passes the torch of least favorite home video vendor to
Paramount.
Paramount Pictures has recently re-issued the Jack Ryan "franchise" films on DVD. A franchise by only the thinnest definition, since they keep re-casting the Ryan character and since only one of the films was any good. John McTiernan's
Hunt or Red October, better known as Die Hard On A
Submarine, is, simply, one of the greatest pop action adventures ever made. It ranks right up there with
Die Hard itself— DH getting the edge only in its ground-breaking cleverness (McTiernan made the villain funnier and more interesting than the hero;
October really has no villain. Politics is the villain).
October is simply a canonical A-List Must Have film for any home theater enthusiast. It is the best Star Trek film ever made. And, I could give a rat's hiney about the Ryan "franchise," this film stands alone as a monumentally fun wallop of plot and character and The Big Toy— the futuristic Red October submarine. Here, McTiernan breaks even more ground by making the Russian submarine bigger, more powerful and more advanced than the US sub chasing it. The sleek October is a glory to behold, as big as a World War II aircraft carrier and, inside, a control center as big as the Batcave with walls and walls of gauges and consoles clearly intended to evoke the bridge of Captain Kirk's USS Enterprise. It is an absolutely bald tweak on the old Trek premise and we absolutely revel in it. It follows the
Die Hard basic premise of Make It Fun, and the casting is an absolute
marvel.
Sam Neil is the stand out as the Red October's first officer, pining for a
"round American bride" and wandering around Montana in an
RV. Neil's dying words, "I'd have liked to have seen Montana," are stuff movie legends are made of: funny and horribly poignant all at once. The film creates in Neil the character the audience most trusts and relies upon. His death is something we should have
seen coming— after all, he was the character the audience most trusts and relies upon— but when it happens, we are nonetheless amused, saddened and stunned all at once. Absolute mastery of popcorn film making.
I'm sure I have a top ten list of favorite films (and, I suppose I need to qualify that as favorite modern films, films of the last decade or two).
October, released in 1989, skirts the edge of that definition by virtue of its age. But it lands squarely somewhere in my top five if not top three favorite modern films (number one, Oliver Stone's
JFK, number two, the don't write me and complain about it, I know its bad and don't care
Armageddon).
So far as submarine movies go, there really is only one submarine movie: Wolfgang Petersen's
Das Boot. Boot is the sub film ever other modern sub
film has attempted to emulate, both in terms of artistic design
and emotional punch. Petersen has us rooting for Nazis—
Nazis, for heaven's sake— as the doomed U-Boat tries to make its way home. Finding Our Way Home is a universal concept, a story that works every time, and Boot defined this genre, mostly by Petersen's sheer strength of will and the tremendous acting chops that transcend subtitles and draw you into the crew's peril.
U-571, released around the time of
Gladiator, is a film I spent the summer watching over and over. Mainly for the sound— the Americans capture a German U-Boat and, yes, have to Find Their Way Home, running from both the Nazis and the US Navy at the same time.
U-571 is a blatant rip-off of Das Boot, down to the smallest detail and cinematography. That no one on the film crew was brave enough to just admit this in the commentaries was my great disappointment. I guess there are only so many angles you can shoot inside of a sardine can, but a comparison between
U-571 and Das Boot shows, clearly, the more recent film leaning heavily on the former (and vastly superior)
Boot. To it's credit, U-571 doesn't bother with much of a story. In fact, when the end credits started rolling, I was a bit surprised: it seemed too quick.
But, sure enough, I checked my watch and I'd been in the theater about ninety minutes or so, and the ride was over.
U-571 attempts to make us care about its characters (and, indeed, I found myself rooting for Kapitanlieutenant Wassner, the captured German U-Boat captain,
winningly played by Thomas Kretschmann— a ringer for Jürgen
Prochnow's captain in Das Boot.
Bill Paxton's unintended laugh-out-loud moment where his Lt. Commander Mike Dahlgren lectures McConaughey's Lt. Andrew Tyler, that, "Unless you can make those life and death decisions...
[Pauses] ...without pause... [reflects] ...without reflection...
[Pauses again] ...then you're not ready to command a submarine." I spit milk through my nose every time I see this pivotal scene and am bewildered at how director Jonathan Mostow missed this ruination of the plot's most critical moment. But then again, this is a film that cast Jon Bon Jovi, so my
expectations were already low. A fun ride, U-571 was marred by both Paxton and Bon Jovi
(I kept expecting a rock soundtrack— You Give Subs A Baaad Name...!), and by McConaughey's lack of depth. His doe-eyed restraint plays like Harrison Ford Lite, and is
not nearly as compelling as watching Harvey Keitel's Chief Klough do, well, anything. Literally, anything
Keitel was doing at any given moment in this film was more interesting than McConaughey's entire performance. The great sets, the great sound and
cinematography, all lovingly maintained in bombastic DTS on Universal's great disc, can't hide the fact the film is anchored around McConaughey and that we keep waiting for the band to cue up.
Tony Scott's terrific Crimson Tide
is one of my favorite DVD's for a really stupid reason: the
terrific sound recording of a jet taking off of a US aircraft
carrier in the first act. It kind of catches you by surprise,
taking your breath away. Write this down somewhere: All
Bruckheimer Films Rock. Especially on DVD. Back when Disney was
even more of an antichrist than Fox (in the bad old days, Fox
stubbornly insisted on overpricing their DVD's and giving you as
few features as possible. I mean, you were lucky you got the movie),
Simpson-Bruckheimer bucked the tide and, even working within
Disney's stubbornly non-anamorphic restraints, created fabulous
high definition transfers. I would really love a Crimson Tide
and Con Air reissue, a la Criterion's fabulous DTS
facelift of The Rock, but even the basic issues, marred
by Disney's STUPID, STUPID, STUPID "Widescreen"
banner (I mean, at the time, ALL of their films were widescreen,
why ruin the cover art with this hideous banner?!) rocked my
world. Terrific definition, color and saturation, black levels
and a minimum of haloing and edge enhancement. By and large, and
for the time, the better DVD's on the market. And, of course,
eardrum-rattling sound from the masters of The Too-Loud
Soundtrack.
Tons of fun and easy to recommend, Crimson
Tide ultimately satisfies by not even pretending to be a
serious film. All it really needed was Vin Diesel and, maybe
Will Smith to pepper up a wholly predictable string of Things
That Happen In Every Submarine Movie. But this is a Bruckheimer
film, and I just love Jerry Bruckheimer films. I love Scott's
stylish staging and his eye for color and textures. He creates a
surrealism inside Gene Hackman's USS Alabama, using
Hackman's baseball cap as a bite of color to follow him
throughout the tight confines of the ship.
I struggled with the basic premise:
Hackman wants to fire his missiles at Russia, first officer
Denzel Washington wants to get confirmation of an Emergency
Action transmission cut off during a torpedo attack. Hackman
seems too unreasonable, considering the lives of billions—
Americans as well as Russians— hang in the balance. The film struggles
to make Hackman's case, but never convincingly enough. So, even more so
than my beloved Red October, Crimson Tide becomes a film
you must watch with your brain turned off. It is a whole lotta
nutty fun, with all of these sailors running around the ship for
no apparent reason (there's a lot of that in all of these
movies: seamen racing through a ship so claustrophobic I hit my
head, and I'm sitting in my living room). I enjoy Tide
quite a bit, but it's not half the movie October is. The
characters don't have nearly enough depth, and the overlapping
complexity of the October relationships is not on board.
The more recent K19: The Widowmaker had even bigger problems, the largest one being Liam Neeson mopping the floor with Harrison Ford. Neeson is an actor. He's a guy who can really act, and he brings the gravity and authority of no less than
Schindler's List to the party. Harrison is a guy who emotes. Now, it's fun watching Ford emote, but he's no actor, per se. He's a guy who wanders through the film mumbling dialogue and looking concerned, reacting to better performances. Here he attempts this as the guy the Russian military uses to send a message to Neeson's sub boat captain. Neeson is more concerned about the safely of his ship and crew than he is about the political ambitions of the state in their headlong rush to achieve strategic
nuclear parity with the U.S., and so Neeson is forced to work under the emoting Ford, who runs the sub like a tyrant and, you guessed it, stirs the crew toward mutiny before the U-Boat is crippled by a reactor accident and the crew must now pull together to Find Their Way Home.
K19 failed largely because the audience failed to accept Ford as a villain. I suppose this was Ford's way of stretching (he was the executive producer of the film, so this was largely his idea). However, I think the film's first and greatest flaw was in casting Ford not as a Russian but as a villain. Ford can't sell the bad guy or the heavy because we know he's Indy Jones. You know, from the very first frame, that at some point Ford will be converted to heroism and will step up to the plate and risk everything, even his own life and ultimately his career, to save these men. And, maybe that was the intent, but the audience didn't like it and didn't like his on again-off again phony Russian accent or his haircut (Paramount tried desperately to hide both during the trailers: you barely see Ford and rarely hear him speak, which only minimized the audience's interest further).
To my utter surprise, K19 is a very good film, marred only by
Ford's casting (much the same way Thirteen Days is an excellent political thriller, ruined only by Kevin Costner's ridiculous attempts at a
Bahhston accent). Subsequent viewings make the film even stronger because we get to know the brilliant young men who play the sailors, characters we actually get attached to and suffer their
predictable attrition to the film's big heavy: the out of control nuclear reactor, and the risk to world peace should the K19
explode within range of a NATO base. There is a great raft of
Things We Know Are Going To Happen In This Movie, but there are
also a couple of things in K19 I've never seen before, and, honestly, that's all I need to recommend a film: show me something I haven't already seen a million times.
One delight is director Kathyrn Bigelow's clever camera work: she
created a latticework of overhead rails the camera could be rapidly dragged along to wind through the impossibly tight confines of the ship. The production designers integrated these rails into the overhead piping so we see them throughout he film without realizing what they are and what they are actually used for. This saved both time and money since the camera could and does rocket through the set at impossible speeds, pivot and follow another character this way or that way— all in one long unbroken shot that completely delights.
The other moment was the K19 smashing through the ice at the arctic circle. Oh, mama, that was fun, and just, well, different. Something I neither expected nor had seen before. The kids playing the crew are marvelous. They quickly rope us in and we're rooting for them, knowing full well we are being manipulated into caring about them
(they play soccer on the Arctic Circle ice and pose for a photo
with the soviet flag; a photo we know is going to be used
against us). The anchor, throughout, is Neeson. The steady hand, the level head, the father to this family of sailors. Patiently toiling under Ford's single-note glower. Ford's eventual conversion feels too staged and too one-dimensional to be believed. Ford himself is ultimately the reason
K19 fails, and why this fun nail-biter, impeccably shot and brilliantly acted, doesn't quite make the
Red October cut.
 K19 borrows quite heavily from
October (Ford guzzles tea from the same exotic glasses Connery
used in October, and Bigelow has the tea glass slide
around a la a key October scene. Knowing how rabid film
directors are about their shots, I guarantee this was no
accident), which is interesting because, to me, October borrows heavily from Star Trek, not from
Das Boot. There isn't even a single Das Boot moment in
October. But the futuristic ship is hunted by the Klingons— er— the Russians, and skipper Sean Connery (accepted as a Russian despite making no attempt whatsoever at a Russian accent, but damn if he isn't stunning in that wig) is in total Patrick Stewart mode (even though this film pre-dates Stewart's Jean Luc Picard, Connery flat out is Jean Luc here). In
October, Connery creates The Wise Old Guy character he milked through a half dozen other films. Connery has been playing The Man Who Knows More Than You And Is More Capable Than You And So Smirks Knowingly for more than a decade now, diluting his brilliant Captain Marco
Ramius into a parody in such lesser attempts as Entrapment and
The Rock. Red October is the real deal: the seminal work Connery has fed off of for a decade now.
The best thing I can tell you about Red October is Tim
Curry Is In It. I will buy tickets to see Tim Curry read soup can labels. The man is simply that good. His sniveling ship's doctor is classic Curry, threading much-needed comic relief (with occasional assists from Alec Baldwin in his first big role and probably his best to date). Scott Glenn, The World's Most Underrated Actor, and one of my absolute favorites, plays a sub driver named Bart Mancuso (like the Navy would ever give a command to a guy named "Bart") so convincingly even I straightened up whenever he rushed by, barking, "Down ladder! Make a hole!"
The smart placement of Courtney Vance as Seaman Jones, the US Navy enlisted man who graduated from Cal Tech (makes no sense; a Cal Tech grad would most certainly be a commissioned officer), keeps
October from being et another Whites Only film. McTiernan makes good use of Vance as both comic relief and heroic sidekick.
He figures out how to follow the boat, and he becomes our Everyman guide to Tom Clancy's often indecipherable techno-babble. Vance patiently explains what is happening to his skipper, to his trainee— to us. And he succeeds brilliantly at making us African Americans feel welcome in the film and dispenses with the race issue without ever, even once, bringing it up.
October doesn't even try to be
inclusive of women. I suppose some women went to the movie to
check out Connery's tupe or to gawk at Baldwin, but the film
itself is all testosterone. Only three women have speaking parts in this movie: Ryan's wife, his daughter, and the flight attendant. All three say their lines during the opening titles. (a different flight attendent is seen at the end of the movie, but she does not say anything.)
Casting Joss Ackland as Ambassador Andrei Lysenko
was also a smart move. Ackland is The Russian Guy. He's always The Russian Guy in,
like, every movie that has a Russian Guy in it. The moment we
see Ackland we know who he is. He's The Russian Guy. His
interplay with the smarmy National Security Advisor
provides a clever shorthand and an entertaining means of getting
across dense exposition. Kathryn Bigelow uses Ackland to less
effect in K19. While Ackland does bring both gravity and
authority to K19, he's given almost nothing to do other
than be hostile and unreasonable.
Fred Dalton Thompson, better known as the senator from
Tennessee, brings absolute authority to his role as Admiral Painter (a
bookend to the deep well of James Earl Jones' Admiral Grier).
Painter's starchy right-hand man, Captain Davenport, played with bridled hostility towards Ryan
(for wearing the uniform of a Naval officer; a real no-no: military people get real prickly about us civilians playing dress-up) by Daniel Davis,
better known as the butler, Niles, in CBS's The Nanny.
Davenport has a story within a story. Baldwin's earnestness converts
Davenport over the course of a half dozen pages or so, and we see him go from absolute hostility towards Ryan to offering Ryan fatherly advice as Baldwin takes off on a perilous ride to see Glenn's Mancuso. It's a wonderful story within-a-story, brilliant and subtle writing and tremendous, restrained acting: what Harrison Ford attempts to do but doesn't quite have these kind of chops. We don't like Captain Davenport when we first meet him in Admiral Painter's cabin, but by the time Ryan and we say farewell, he's become Dad.
The picture that’s on the back cover of the book was done for Life Magazine, not for the movie company, and it was done at lunchtime on the Red October set. I have the whole crew of the submarine including Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin there and I only had 15 minutes. That was the entire shoot. The Red October set that I shot was not being used that whole week. They were shooting in the missile bay, which was another set on another sound stage. It took me two days to light it and figure out what I wanted and to do my test shots. When Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery came in I knew exactly where I wanted them and it was just a matter of putting the real actors where the stand-ins had been.
—Neil Leifer
Glenn's Mancuso never gets the chance to warm up to Ryan, as by the time Baldwin and Glenn share a
gimbaled sound stage, they've found Connery's rogue boat and have their hands full. The trust Baldwin has accrued over the pervious two hours is completely lost on Glenn, whom we have seen but who has not had any contact with
Baldwin's character. Ryan is back at square one, just as The Red October comes into Mancuso's cross hairs. Ryan's unique solution to this trust issue makes this one of the best and least predictable third acts in popcorn movie history.
 All of which brings us back to the DVD itself. Originally released as a slapper in 1997 (a "slapper" is a film the studio simply "slaps" onto disc without bothering to make much effort to prepare the film for the unique properties of DVD),
The Hunt For Red October was an utter disgrace to DVD, considering it's yee-haw status as
Die Hard On A Submarine. Even Die Hard itself, originally released as a slapper, was given the Five Star treatment when somebody at Fox finally woke up and fired whoever was in charge of their home video division. For years, Fox was the Thief of Baghdad of home video, over-charging for undernourished discs because some fool thought maintaining an unfriendly posture towards home video would protect their (laughs uncontrollably) rental business and box office. This idea was so completely flawed and, well, stupid, I'm glad this guy (and I used to know his name, I forgot) was moved out, and Fox has, over the past years, reinvented itself from THE major home video rip-off to one of the best purveyors of quality content on the market.
Which now passes the torch of least favorite home video vendor to Paramount. In fact, Paramount has shown the home video enthusiast so much contempt, it makes me suspect they hired that guy who got bounced from Fox. The entire Eddie Murphy catalog— classic films like
48 Hours and Beverly Hills Cop— staples of home video collections— were slappers. Unsupervised direct transfers from old Laserdisc pressings. Now, what you need to know abut Laserdiscs is they sound better than DVD's (hands down). But the image quality of a Laserdisc is an analog composite— similar to video tape. It cannot match the high resolution of DVD. Moreover, until DVD came along, most LD transfers were NOT digital high resolution telecines (after the advent of DVD's, LD transfers took a giant leap in quality as they were now made from the same high-rez transfer the DVD's were made from. The DTS Laserdisc of
Armageddon may be about the most fun any human can have with their clothes on. The picture is pristine and virtually
indistinguishable from the initial non-anamorphic DVD release. Criterion's subsequent high-end re-release of
Armageddon edges out the LD, but only marginally).
On Laserdisc, the old catalog stuff, Like Beverly Hills Cop, just reeked. Crappy transfers from
old prints of the film. Paramount, embracing the old Fox logic of Screw The Home Theater Enthusiast (figuring, I suppose, the home theater enthusiast is an at best niche
market). Paramount figured, perhaps rightly, that the larger market of K-Mart moms won't know the difference, so why bother spending the money on a new print of a film from the early 80's? For
48 Hours, they slapped on the actual Laserdisc transfer and had some kid tinker with the sound, which created a wildly out-of-sync track that makes Paramount's
48 Hours DVD utterly unwatchable. Paramount has since wised up and has started actually spending the money to do new transfers for their DVD's, but they are new transfers struck from the same telecine print created for the Laserdiscs. These prints are NOT high-definition transfers and were optimized for the composite analog picture of Laserdiscs. New transfers from these prints only gives you pristine anamorphic video of an inferior print of the film, Ladies and gentleman:
Beverly Hills Cop. A terrific, anamorphic transfer of a crappy print of the film. Thank you, Paramount.
DVD File, one of my favorite websites, posted a review of the
Red October re-issue before the disc shipped. I rely heavily on DVD File for guidance about what to get and what to avoid, so I anxiously tore through their assessment of this, one of my favorite films. When I saw the review had been handed off, that the site's owner, Peter M. Bracke, had not done the review himself, I felt like DVD File was giving
Red October the Paramount treatment. Ok, maybe I'm the only man alive who has such high regard for this film. The staff reviewer, Dan Ramer, spent half a screen talking about the plot, which told me he simply wasn't a fan of the film. This film is now 14 years old. We do not need a huge dissertation of the plot. The plot to
Red October goes like this: Kirk, Scotty and McCoy have stolen the Enterprise and are fleeing across the neutral zone pursued by both the Klingons and the Federation, Trying To Make It Back Home. Enough
about the plot.
Ramer's review failed to tell me the one thing I, and I would imagine, most every other home enthusiast who goes to this site wanted to know: how does the re-release stack up to the original slapper? Ramer fails to even once allude to the original release or recommend this new one based on any comparison to the old one. He goes on about how this a wonderful transfer and the sound is great and so on.
Hoping for the kind of dignity in restoration work Fox afforded McTiernan's
Die Hard in its re-release (a fabulous fix from a brand new print of the film), I dove in based on Ramer's recommendation. Now I have to wonder if Ramer was watching the same video I was.
The re-release of Red October is, at best, marginally better than its original slapper. A brand new transfer CLEARLY and OBVIOUSLY made from the same telecine as the THX Laserdisc (I would know: I own the LD), the reissue fails miserably at giving this fine film the dignity and respect it deserves. There is mud everywhere. Mud, mud, mud. Hardly any definition in the colors as the blacks all
mush together. The film suffers, painfully, from a lack of resolution, a clear indicator that the telecine was not a new high-definition print prepared for DVD's ultra high resolution but
the same ol' print made for the murky Wal-Mart crowd's $8.99 VHS rack. This is painful, demoralizing hack work.
 The DTS sound is a joke, a cheap and fast hacked out transfer from the original THX Laser Disc audio track. For most DVD restorations, the restorers go all the way back to the vaults and find the original multi-track tapes and create new sound from them. The very best restorations have had the film makers even re-recording or re-mixing scores to open up the breadth and drama of the
sound. Das Boot is a prime example. The 1997 restoration
of this film, now available in Sony's controversial "SuperBit"
format, is nothing short of a masterpiece. And Fox, former high
criminal of DVD, restored The French Connection last year
to a double-disc Five Star Edition with sound so true and a
print so pristine you'd think they shot this thing last year. It
can be done, kids, if the studio is willing to respect
their consumer base. I'm sure whatever intern mixed the new Red October issue did the best he or she could, but the origins of this sound are clear: the same basic sound mix from the Laserdisc tweaked by some kid eating a ham sandwich.
The featurette and commentary are nice gimmes, but, honestly, I buy films for neither of those things. I buy films for the film. These features can add to my enjoyment of the film, but if the film itself is painful to watch
— and both of Paramount's issues of
Red October most definitely are— then what's the point.
Thus, Paramount remains in my no-fly zone: I simply do not buy Paramount home video products (I bought
K19 used). Until they wake up and stop treating me like dirt, thanks but no thanks. They have obvious contempt for me and my TV set, so the hell with them. And, Peter, if you're out there, your pal Dan could use a little work understanding his audience. His was the Paramount Home Video of reviews, and it undermined my confidence in your site as a resource for purchasing decisions.
Alas, poor Red October. The 80's hair cuts notwithstanding, the film still rocks. Had they restored
October the way they restored Die Hard, this disc would rival the way daffier but expertly crafted
Armageddon disc for must-own fun flick status. Instead, I can only add this shameful reissue to the collection and suffer through only the occasional viewing: Paramount's contempt for me as a consumer marring my basic enjoyment of this terrific film.
The Hunt For Red October: Film: A, DVD: D, Collector's
Edition Reissue: C; Das Boot: Film & DVD: A; U-571: Film: C,
DVD: B; Crimson Tide: Film & DVD: B; K19: The Widowmaker:
Film & DVD: B
Christopher J. Priest
13 May 2003
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