Every movie in this list is a stand along piece that offers amazing talent and awesome storylines. Takes all the fun out of it somehow.There is nothing like a watching one of the best submarine movies to get your blood boiling and your mind excited. There are two kinds of scope in our Collins-class submarines – one for attack, one for search. "When you've been working in one all day, you don't really want to watch a movie about one." Nor do they ever get to say "up periscope". My spies tell me that Australian submariners watch a lot of movies at sea, but they're rarely about subs. Run Silent Run Deep (1958), with Clark Gable, also gets respect. The Hunt for Red October (1990) is one of the favourites of real submariners, along with Das Boot and Torpedo Run (1958). Sean Connery stayed Scottish in command of the Red October, even when he was speaking Russian. The title tells you there were teething problems. Harrison Ford adopted a Russian accent from somewhere near Limerick to command the first Russian nuclear sub in K-19: The Widowmaker. Since 1954, when the Americans launched the first nuclear-powered sub, the submarine movie has been bathed in a nuclear glow. They rival the spy movie for primacy in this region, but the stakes are much higher, because they carry nuclear weapons. The post-war sub movie became a vehicle for Cold War politics. Some people have long memories – which is why Jonathan Mostow, director of that film, is a name that will live in infamy in a corner of Staffordshire. The reason is that Able Seaman Colin Grazier, from Tamworth, died in October 1942 while rescuing codebooks from a sinking German submarine, U-559. A newspaper cutting from the Tamworth Herald in Staffordshire carries the headline "A stunning, but unforgiveable submarine film". If you visit Bletchley Park just outside London, there is a display of outrage in one of the huts. The Americans had not yet entered the war. Tony Blair called it "an affront" to British sailors, who first captured an Enigma machine in May 1941. It's a good adventure film, full of American daring, the kind Hollywood loves. Keitel has the immortal line, when the Americans are trying to figure out how to work the U-boat, "It's all in German." He also gets to say "dive, dive, dive". McConaughey and his barebones crew must take charge of the stricken U-571 and get the Enigma back to port. Just as they're getting the precious coding machine off, another German sub torpedoes their American sub, killing everyone. In U-571, Matthew McConaughey and Harvey Keitel steal an Enigma machine from a German U-boat stranded in the Atlantic. About the only one they can't do in a sub is a fear of heights. The sub film collects all the anxieties in one place: fear of entombment, drowning, confined spaces, asphyxiation, fire and the very real danger that your head might explode if the captain runs too deep. Real subs today are much safer than movie subs.) (To readers who have a loved one at sea right now, I stress: that was then. At the beginning of Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot, the greatest submarine movie ever made, a title tells us that 40,000 Germans went to war in subs in World War II, and 30,000 never came back. In a wartime sub movie, the ship becomes a metal coffin, waiting to be filled. A submarine then adds heat or cold, foul air, machinery that's loud, dangerous and possibly toxic and a crew of men – usually a dozen key players – who are halfway to death as soon as they come aboard, especially in wartime. The same formula applies to any confined space – the spaceship in 2001 or Alien, the ice station in The Thing. Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot was the greatest submarine movie ever made.
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