Hunter Killer

Donovan Marsh runs 2 lines at once: Commander Joe Glass chasing a lost American submarine in the Barents Sea, and a SEAL team watching a Russian base at Polyarny. What the team sees is not an accident but a coup, the defence minister holding his own president. Bought in 2008, the script sat: Pierre Morel, Phillip Noyce, Antoine Fuqua and Martin Campbell each attached and left before Marsh took the job in 2016. Submarine interiors were built at Ealing Studios from US Navy approved blueprints, mounted on a gimbal to fake the swell. The exterior hull went into Pinewood’s outdoor water tank, the underwater work to Leavesden, the Russian base interiors to Nu Boyana in Sofia. The pressure is persuasion, not torpedoes: Glass must talk the rescued Russian captain Andropov into steering him through a minefield, then talk his crew into trusting him. Michael Nyqvist, who plays Andropov, died in 2017, over a year before release. A good fit if you want the cutting between submarine and shore team tied to one countdown, with the silent minefield run as the payoff. Not for you if the politics grate: Russia is one plotting minister and a president to rescue. Ukraine refused the film a screening licence, the official explanation being its positive image of the Russian president and an admiral.