I dare say this was the first "serious," "grown-up" flick I saw as a child--and even then, it was just peaking from behind my Dad while he and some friends watched it on VHS one Thanksgiving weekend (presumably while waiting for some game to start). So young was I and so undeveloped my capacity for abstract thought, that the scariest part for me was when a Russian sailor laughed at Jack Ryan for "turning green" as he shared a cigarette--for I did not grasp that this was but a joke, a metaphor, that he was not physiologically turning green in some horrid Lynchian nightmare.
It later became one of my favorite films by Middle School (which was also likely the last time I've seen it). Such was its impression on me, that for years I assumed the film's score was the actual anthem of the Soviet Union.
Re-watching it today was, like all revisits of childhood memories, an anxious experience. For as we all know, some youthful artifacts are best left untouched, as they all too often can't stand up to the harsh light of adulthood.
Loading Red October in particular was especially fraught. For starters, the film is arguably most notorious today for casting a Scotman as a Russian, one who scarcely even tries to affect an accent, as though they thought Americans were too dumb to tell the difference anyways. What other glaring flaws would become obvious this time through?
Then there's the sheer dated nature of the subject matter. When the book was first published, the Cold War was still in full swing; but by the 1990 adaptation, the Soviet Union was actively collapsing. By the following year, the film's geopolitics would be laughably outdated--and how much more so by 2015?
Likewise, author Tom Clancy felt increasingly trapped in amber. His '90s books, rather than moving beyond the Cold War world, seemed to endlessly grasp at new ways to revive it--whether by switching the threat to China, or even just bringing back good ol' fashioned Soviet Russia. (It's like he was nostalgic for the Cold War and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation!)
Worse still, he realized that he was now a "brand," and so then promptly began diluting it through cheap video game adaptations, "co-authored" novels that farmed out his actual writing to formulaic hacks, and dreadful new novel series (I seem to recall an especially dire one called "NetForce," wherein an FBI task-force with VR helmets battled ex-KGB rogue agents in cyberspace, in the futuristic year of 2010; it couldn't have been more '90s if it had been sporting a pair of JNCOs).
By 9/11, many folks openly wondered why Clancy, this former insurance agent perpetually stuck in the Cold War, was on TV giving "expert" counter-terrorist advise. He sadly seemed a fit symbol of the times, as the Bush administration likewise invaded Iraq as though it were still the Cold War, as though organized land invasions of sovereign states could defeat asymmetric terrorist cells and tribal rivalries. I feared Clancy's first film adaptation would similarly feel painfully out of touch with our present world.
What's more, I was raised in a fairly conservative home, and when I last saw Red October, still self-identified as one; but I now lean firmly left, to say the least. Tom Clancy, to put it mildly, did not. Would this film now come off to me as a giant cringe-fest, as some ridiculously jingoist, self-congratulatory, oblivious, patriotic wankfest? I began to wonder if I should just catch up with the latest season of Parks and Rec instead.
But I soldiered on and rewatched it anyways. Glad I did. Here's what I found:
- The score should have been the anthem of the Soviet Union (and Russia don't have a bad one to begin with).
- I was shocked by how many lines I still remembered, viz: "Most things in here don't react well to bullets." "I'm a politician, and that means when I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollipops." "Andrei, you've lost another sub?"
- I'd forgotten that there was a time in the '80s and early-'90s when James Earl Jones was well-nigh inescapable. From Darth Vader to Field of Dreams to Mufasa, he was the center of gravity for some of my earliest childhood cinema. I guess the whole black-man-as-the-voice-of-god role has been ceded to Morgan Freeman nowadays; but before Freeman it was Jones.
- Dr. Beverly Crusher from TNG makes a cameo as an English nanny in the opening scenes. That is all.
- Movies used to be much better paced, and far more efficient in building characters in shorts amount of time. Red October is a good example of that. It's a lost art that Hollywood needs to recover.
- Sweet mercy, Alex Baldwin looks young here! It caused me such cognitive dissonance to remember that he is Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock. Especially given what a raging liberal Baldwin is in real life.
- But then, that was another thing about Red October: Just how...well, not liberal per se it was, but how much of it a liberal could still get behind it. The hero, you see, is an idealistic young scholar who actually attempts diplomacy first, who assumes the best of his enemy, who reaches out, shoots only as a last resort, tries to save as many lives--yes, even enemy lives--as possible, and who talks down an American naval commander from attacking an enemy sub possibly on its way to nuke the east coast. Consider, by contrast, how much the Jack Bauer "ticking time bomb" defense is employed today to monstrously defend torture, "extraordinary rendition," and deploying drones to shoot first and ask questions later (even if it turns out to be less an enemy camp than an Afghan wedding). Jack Ryan, this fictional CIA spook dreamed up by an ardent Reaganite conservative, is practically a filthy hippie compared to 21st century America.
- Then there are the reasons for Sean Connery's--er, Capt. Remus'--defection. As he explains in the final scene, "there are those who believe that we should attack the United States first. Settle everything in one moment. Red October was built for that purpose." That is, Remus defects in order to prevent nuclear war. This hardened Soviet naval captain is a peace-nick at heart.
- Ryan and Remus then bond over the memories of learning to fish from their grandfathers. The image is clear: we are far more like our enemies than we are different, and we may all be one in the end. How much more idealistic can you get?
- In one early scene, we learn the political officer on board the Red October is a dirtbag because he snoops through Capt. Ramus' Bible, then justifies himself with "privacy is not a priority of the People's Republic." Yes, that's right, lack of privacy was once a signifier of an evil dictatorship, of something only the commies did--and not, say, a standard condition of the PATRIOT ACT, the NSA, and over-posting on Facebook. How far we've come.
- I said earlier that Tom Clancy has a weird nostalgia for the Cold War. It's even more basic than that: Clancy has a nostalgia for honor in warfare. Clancy, deep down, I suspect still wishes we had rigged clippers waging noble combat in close-quarters upon the high seas. Russia and America are not truly enemies in Red October, no--they are only opponents.
- Closely related to that is the sheer competency of all the players in this film. From Remus and the Red October, to the crew of the USS Dallas figuring out how to track her, to Fred Thompson's navy admiral, to Jack Ryan and Jones' CIA chief, to the on-board KGB saboteur, to the pursuing Russian sub, to Russia just able to innovate silent subs in the first place, this film is a roll-call of uber-competent professionals at the top of their game, making all the right moves at the right time. Here, people do not capitalize on each others mistakes, since no one makes any--they only out-maneuver each other. In a cinematic world (not to mention a real world) that is so dominated nowadays by fools, dolts, ignoramuses, and "loveable" losers tripping over their own feet and blundering into success, it is frankly refreshing to see competent adults in charge for a change.
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