The Hunt for Red October

John McTiernan’s film shows almost no open combat. The tension comes from who knows what, and the climax amounts to two crews reading each other’s sonar. The Russians speak Russian at the start, subtitled, until the political officer played by Peter Firth reads from Revelation: the camera pushes in to his mouth, the dialogue crosses into English on Armageddon, the same word in both languages, then pulls back. It never returns to Russian. Sean Connery plays the Soviet captain in his own Scottish accent. Ramius was first cast with Klaus Maria Brandauer; Connery replaced him. Filming ended in March 1990, as the Soviet Parliament stripped the Communist Party of power, so a crawl was added setting the story in 1984. The underwater shots were made dry, on smoke filled stages, with miniatures on wires and motion control. At ILM, Scott E. Anderson wrote psys, the studio’s first general purpose particle system; every water shot that came to ILM went through it, and the crew nicknamed the white specks plankton. It won the Oscar for sound effects editing and was nominated for sound and film editing. A good fit if you want the wait between a torpedo and a sonar return to outlast the action. Not for viewers who will read the mid scene switch out of Russian as a shortcut.