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).
Which isn't my experience at all. I've always seen PMs spend a bunch of time on the road talking to customers and in executive briefing centers. (And I was one in hardware at some distant point.) Engineers, sensibly, don't really want to spend that much time with customers--and even if they talk to one or two it sort of colors their opinions by that one customer's requirements.
PM: I am good at talking to people! Can’t you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you!?
Edit: Having been around for a while I’ve learned to appreciate PMs. You have to be very careful what you say in front of customers or focus groups. If you had two engineers and one customer chatting unsupervised it would turn into a brainstorming session, and after 45 minutes we’re building a flying police box that can travel through time.
You might want to add some indication if this was sarcasm. If it wasn't then that's wrong - engineers should be directly talking to customers, at least some of the time. It's by far the best way to get direct feedback on what real problems customers are having with the product.
I think we all agree on that; the problem is that some customer relationship management is .. highly political. Lots of face saving and message discipline. Engineers are not trusted to have the skills to do that even if you've got time to keep them fully briefed on what the story you're allowed to tell the customer is.
Sometimes even asking the wrong question can cause an upset. Engineers are prone to thinking or even saying things like, "successfully delivering the project is more important than the ego of a middle ranking procurement manager in the client, right?"
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 have a slightly more negative take on the same (positive!) phenomenon of non-English origin content becoming more popular with English audiences: the ability of Hollywood to actually complete and deliver projects is deteriorating, especially among mid-size productions and TV series that don't cost millions of dollars per episode.
(also K-drama and telenovella plotting just absolutely trashes focus-grouped US streamer TV insipidness)
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.
Shogun is absolutely fantastic. But it's not quite the same as a for-export production; it was an American-led production team adapting an American novel trying to be as authentically Japanese as possible. With great success. You're absolutely correct about the period language. It seems to have been a hit in Japan, indicating they got it right: https://www.tokyoweekender.com/entertainment/movies-tv/shogu...
>> The new Shogun has been well received by Western audiences, but it’s been a monster hit among Japanese viewers — possibly because they know the story. They know who Tokugawa Ieyasu is, they know about his rival Ishida Mitsunari and the Battle of Sekigahara the show is building up to. It doesn’t matter that these characters and events have different names in Shogun. It’s not exactly clear why the author did that, but in James Clavell’s novel, Adams is named John Blackthorne and Ieyasu is Yoshii Toranaga.
Various people have pointed out that Japan makes a ton of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jidaigeki shows in a similar style (and with a similar vocabulary, making Shogun comprehensible to JP viewers), but for domestic consumption, and they don't really get exported. I guess having the character of Blackthorne as an anchor is critical for Western viewers.
While we're on the subject, this audience might like https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066473/ , which was a true Japanese-American co-production war movie. Bit of a specialist watch as it's nearly two and a half hours long. Some uncredited assistant direction was done by Kurosawa.
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 think one person mentioned it. But agree. Other sub movies I enjoyed a lot like Hunt for Red October but they're pretty much movies versus realistic.
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.
I guess it's good to validate the answer, but I would have guessed Das Boot going in, and the answers merely confirm that I already knew the answer. The couple of exceptions are interesting though.
A little OT, but the funniest sub movie has got to be "Operation Petticoat", with Cary Grant and Tony Curtis at their best. And it does have a real (though pink) WW2 sub in it.
Adm Greenert nicely describes the attitude toward early 90s sub movies (Hunt for Red October vs Crimson Tide). For this audience, in addition to driving maneuvers, he might have added that the main premise of Red October (a clipped message) never could have happened under the existing communication protocol.
Sigh. The curse of the acronym. I have to look up what TFA stands for. At least I didn't waste fellow HN peeps' time by commenting "What does TFA mean?" I will never understand why someone would take more time to post a comment like that than it would take to Google it....
Turns out I'm not the only one! Here's a spirited discussion on HN from 2019 in which a number of commenters note they have no clue what it means, or else have had it wrong all along:
Das Boot is probably the most realistic. For more drama, Crimson Tide is a good watch. The Hunt For Red October is more of a fantasy, but also good drama.
And after reading TFA I can see it's the most voted one. I don't know if it's the most realistic one but, sheesh, does it feel claustrophobic and stressful!
- 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!