This article asks various Navy men their thoughts. This one by Lieutenant Commander Jeff Vandenengel stuck out.
- Office Space is the best submarine movie. TPS reports, multiple bosses, a defective printer, coming in on Saturday, the oversight team of “the Bobs” that are “there to help,” and the engineers are not allowed to talk to normal people. Incredibly accurate!
Because engineers can't talk to customers. They need a project manager to receive the requirements sent over from the customers, and then bring the requirements to the engineers (or have someone bring them over).
Sounds like the German film Das Boot is a winner (the German version of All Quiet on the Western Front is also amazing. Looks like the German film industry is doing well).
My fave was the burb by Lieutenant Commander Jeff Vandenengel (U.S. Navy).
I have onoy seen Das Boot once, it was the full version at midnight in a quiet neighbourhood, all lights off in the house, surround sound setup in the room (never met anyone with this since) it was terrifying and the hours somehow flew by despite being on the edge of my seat and alert for much of it. Definitely recommend seeing the movie in this context if anyone is lucky enough to get the chance.
>Sounds like the German film Das Boot is a winner (the German version of All Quiet on the Western Front is also amazing. Looks like the German film industry is doing well).
It is? By what metric?
Yes, Das Boot is a fantastic movie, but it came out around 1980; that's about 45 years ago now!
The new AQotWF movie has great reviews too. It just came out within the last year I think.
That's two great movies in a 50-year period. This is not what I would call "doing well".
There might be a few more examples of good German movies, but overall I would not call the German film industry world-leading by any means.
Fair enough, but I have watched quite a bit of German stuff, lately, thanks to Netflix and Amazon. I’m sure that the driver is lower cost, but the shows have still been excellent.
There’s also the rather interesting English-language Spanish stuff that Netflix has been broadcasting, and some great Scandinavian stuff (I preferred In Order of Disappearance to Cold Pursuit, even though the American version was quite faithful to the original).
I know that Hollywood has been doing a lot of of offshore development (just like Silicon Valley—for the same reason), which has likely been training non-US artists in American production techniques and sensibilities (just like Silicon Valley).
I think that's more a question of Germans being better able to adapt source material that's written by Germans in German and set (partly) in Germany featuring German speakers.
True, but locally-relevant entertainment often doesn’t export well, even if it is extremely well-done. That seems to be changing. Maybe the wider distribution is “commoditizing” personal tastes.
I should note that Germans weren’t the only ones operating subs in WWII (but they were definitely operating the majority of them), so the submarine experience wasn’t unique to Germany.
I also really enjoyed the new Shogun limited series. It deserved every award it got. I heard that the Japanese they spoke was period-accurate, so it was maybe the equivalent of an English-language Shakesperian movie.
One movie that was not even mentioned: The Fifth Missile (1986).
Aboard a nuclear-armed submarine, crew members gradually begin to descend into madness. The cause: chronic inhalation of toxic paint fumes from freshly coated interior surfaces. The resulting disorientation leads them to mistake a routine drill for the outbreak of a real nuclear war.
If Down Periscope gets a honourable mention, The Fifth Missile should, too.
Good news bad news:
Good: It's on YouTube in its 2-hour 50-minute entirety, free.
Bad: It's in French with French subtitles and a terribly low-res picture.
Fun Fact: It's a made for TV (NBC) movie.
Have at it: https://youtu.be/KMWo3hUNixc?si=eUAfihWua1eNltD6
With so much attention on Das Boot, I would also recommend the DVD version of the TV series.
The TV version shows the monotony which transports the relief when finally making enemy contact a lot more. In the DVD versions the individual episodes are cut together into a continuing movie of more than 4 hours.
The director's cut however has improved visuals and sound, also worthwhile if you don't have the time for the big thing.
Das Boot's soundtrack also takes the cake for me. Just compare the main title themes for Das Boot and Red October; both are good, but Das Boot's make you feel like you are in a submarine. The combination of synths, mechanical sounds, and even the sonar ping sound really adds to the artificality and claustrophobia.
Apple commissioned director Edward Berger (Academy Award-winning "All Quiet on the Western Front") to make this story of a torpedo attack on a U.S. sub during WW2.
It was an absolute given that Das Boot would by far be the first movie mentioned by so many of them in this post. It was the instant first movie that came to my mind and nothing comes quite close, even today, decades later. An absolute masterpiece of serious film making.
Fun facts now: the cast of Das Boot was obliged to constantly stay indoors during the entire length of filming, forcefully as part of an effort to both give them a grossly pallid, sickly complexion like you'd expect from a WWII era submariner at sea for months, and to create a sense of claustrophobia that would percolate into more realistic acting.
Also, the mockup of the submarine's interior was built for maximum realism in its size and all usable physical details, with the actors rigorously trained to move through this space as naturally as possible (as a real German U-boat crew would)
The effort, along with the great script, fantastic cast and of course, memorable music, shows in pretty much everything, right down to the disgusting details of how they look and act after weeks at sea. One hell of a movie, and while my personal experience with submarines is zero, this is the one that feels like it should be absolute most realistic depiction of crewing a sub from that era. It fully deserves its rank as one of the most highly rated films of any kind on most movie ranking websites, like IMDB and etc.
I can also see why it's the most highly voted film among submariners. Even if modern nuclear subs are at a whole other level of comfort compared to anything from 85 years ago, certain basics stay the same: It's a claustrophobic, fully enclosed space with nothing but artificial lighting, observation almost entirely through instruments, and crushing, nearly inescapable, horrible death just a few inches of hull and a couple sudden mistakes away.
All this is the case in a way that just doesn't apply to the same degree with any surface vessel, where you can still somehow feel directly connected to and within reach of the wider, comforting world.
It probably has more in common with space travel than being out at sea in these characteristics.
Even if authentic, a modern nuclear sub movie just isn't going to have the same feel. I suppose you could cite K-19: The Widowmaker though that's relatively old at this point as well.
I expected K-19 to be further up the list - or at least get a mention. My naive metric for realism roughly translates to 'How much does this feel like a documentary?' - and K-19, in spite of the big names, certainly felt like a story being re-told.
I know a retired nuke submariner very well. He says modern subs are luxurious compared to U-boats in Das Boot, but feeling is 100% true even today. You can make a sub more spacious, but that won’t make it less claustrophobic.
It looks like senior officers are a bit over-represented in this survey, not surprising since it came from the US Naval Institute. Senior Partridge seems to be the only one willing to admit that Down Periscope does a surprisingly good job of capturing the inanity and absurdity of submarining. I’d argue Office Space, mentioned in a sibling comment, underrepresents the suck for the Wardroom, Nukes, and possibly MTs.
Readit News
- Office Space is the best submarine movie. TPS reports, multiple bosses, a defective printer, coming in on Saturday, the oversight team of “the Bobs” that are “there to help,” and the engineers are not allowed to talk to normal people. Incredibly accurate!
why?
That sounds the complete antithesis of agile to me.
Is a "agile" now a term like "woke", devoid of all useful meaning
My fave was the burb by Lieutenant Commander Jeff Vandenengel (U.S. Navy).
WikiPedia's list of submarine films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_films
It is? By what metric?
Yes, Das Boot is a fantastic movie, but it came out around 1980; that's about 45 years ago now!
The new AQotWF movie has great reviews too. It just came out within the last year I think.
That's two great movies in a 50-year period. This is not what I would call "doing well".
There might be a few more examples of good German movies, but overall I would not call the German film industry world-leading by any means.
There’s also the rather interesting English-language Spanish stuff that Netflix has been broadcasting, and some great Scandinavian stuff (I preferred In Order of Disappearance to Cold Pursuit, even though the American version was quite faithful to the original).
I know that Hollywood has been doing a lot of of offshore development (just like Silicon Valley—for the same reason), which has likely been training non-US artists in American production techniques and sensibilities (just like Silicon Valley).
I should note that Germans weren’t the only ones operating subs in WWII (but they were definitely operating the majority of them), so the submarine experience wasn’t unique to Germany.
I also really enjoyed the new Shogun limited series. It deserved every award it got. I heard that the Japanese they spoke was period-accurate, so it was maybe the equivalent of an English-language Shakesperian movie.
Aboard a nuclear-armed submarine, crew members gradually begin to descend into madness. The cause: chronic inhalation of toxic paint fumes from freshly coated interior surfaces. The resulting disorientation leads them to mistake a routine drill for the outbreak of a real nuclear war.
If Down Periscope gets a honourable mention, The Fifth Missile should, too.
The TV version shows the monotony which transports the relief when finally making enemy contact a lot more. In the DVD versions the individual episodes are cut together into a continuing movie of more than 4 hours.
The director's cut however has improved visuals and sound, also worthwhile if you don't have the time for the big thing.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/yDvASSABhNQ?si=iVSqDKuIUlrh23IF
Apple commissioned director Edward Berger (Academy Award-winning "All Quiet on the Western Front") to make this story of a torpedo attack on a U.S. sub during WW2.
Talk about claustrophobia and fear....
Fun facts now: the cast of Das Boot was obliged to constantly stay indoors during the entire length of filming, forcefully as part of an effort to both give them a grossly pallid, sickly complexion like you'd expect from a WWII era submariner at sea for months, and to create a sense of claustrophobia that would percolate into more realistic acting.
Also, the mockup of the submarine's interior was built for maximum realism in its size and all usable physical details, with the actors rigorously trained to move through this space as naturally as possible (as a real German U-boat crew would)
The effort, along with the great script, fantastic cast and of course, memorable music, shows in pretty much everything, right down to the disgusting details of how they look and act after weeks at sea. One hell of a movie, and while my personal experience with submarines is zero, this is the one that feels like it should be absolute most realistic depiction of crewing a sub from that era. It fully deserves its rank as one of the most highly rated films of any kind on most movie ranking websites, like IMDB and etc.
I can also see why it's the most highly voted film among submariners. Even if modern nuclear subs are at a whole other level of comfort compared to anything from 85 years ago, certain basics stay the same: It's a claustrophobic, fully enclosed space with nothing but artificial lighting, observation almost entirely through instruments, and crushing, nearly inescapable, horrible death just a few inches of hull and a couple sudden mistakes away.
All this is the case in a way that just doesn't apply to the same degree with any surface vessel, where you can still somehow feel directly connected to and within reach of the wider, comforting world.
It probably has more in common with space travel than being out at sea in these characteristics.