Flasz On Film

Celebrating its 30^th birthday this week, the Tony Scott-directed Crimson Tide is remembered for several reasons: its tight storytelling, the showdown between two powerhouse performers, the central quandary underpinning its plot, or the accessibility of its spectacle. It only enjoyed a single week of unopposed reign at the box office, as it landed after Michael Bay’s debut Bad Boys had collected the bulk of its due, but it was quickly swept aside by Die Hard with a Vengeance, Apollo 13, Batman Forever and Pocahontas. 

Nevertheless, it persists in our collective memory as one of the most compelling entries in the subgenre of submarine movies alongside such classics as The Hunt for the Red October, Das Boot or Run Silent, Run Deep and for many film fans, such as yours truly, Crimson Tide remains a comfort classic. It’s easy to put on and have fun with and it also stands as a relic of the star system, now buried under a mountain of branded IP franchises where the actor oftentimes completely disappears into the character and hides behind their costume while advancing a plot stretched over multiple movies, all bloated with superfluous tangents. It’s a one-and-done in-and-out experience that doesn’t ask the viewer for any more commitment that it takes to sit through two hours of Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington engaging in a battle of wills in a setting that could just as easily be transplanted to a theatre setting. And I’d go to watch that too.  

However, under the guise of its immense accessibility—afforded most assuredly thanks to Tony Scott’s uncanny ability to make everything just big enough to feel magical and elevated but still small and balanced enough to remain authentic and broadly realistic—Crimson Tide harbors something more: an accessible conversation about the morality of war and personal responsibility in the context of a military chain of command. This is partly thanks to the simple fact the movie was loosely inspired by real events that took place aboard a Soviet submarine during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis where the captain of the vessel and the ship’s political officer advocated the launch of nuclear weapons in the absence of communication from their superiors, while the second-in-command Vasily Arkhipov stood fast and refused to give his assent to the order to launch.  

Even critics at the time picked up on this and praised Scott’s movie for being more than just another dumb action thriller and subverting the expectations of the genre whose remit is to offer entertainment first and foremost. Roger Ebert himself saw the fact that on top of its top-notch high-pressure spectacle Crimson Tide offered a conversation on the way home relating not to the set pieces or special effects, but the moral issues addressed in the movie as a flat-out victory. Crimson Tide thus remains a thinking man’s action thriller that uses the veneer of a movie about a giant metal tube filled with seamen to serve the viewer both a blood-curdling experience and an opportunity to examine how close to self-destruction as a species we continue to persist because the giant sword of Damocles of nuclear Armageddon didn’t magically disappear with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We just got so used to it being there that we have grown to ignore its presence. If there was a gun barrel pressed against your temple every minute of every day, how quickly would you learn to just accept its existence and go about your day? Crimson Tide reminded us of that bone-chilling fact and reiterated just how thin the line is between the current status quo and complete annihilation and how we might not even know that on several occasions we have come within an inch of crossing it and waking up to a total nuclear apocalypse.

This is where the story usually ends as far as the oral history and the thematic sphere of Crimson Tide are concerned. But there’s more to it and here I am highlighting another angle you might want to assume while watching this movie, which might allow you to see this taut thriller not only as a lean and mean macho showdown with a philosophical underbelly, but also as a movie about filmmaking itself.  

What lurks beneath—runs silent, runs deep, as it were—the central narrative and the discussion orbiting it is a broader conversation about intergenerational friction. Old versus young. Brash versus calculated. Power versus empathy. You could easily map a general interpretation over top of the movie’s narrative simply thanks to the difference in age between the two principals, Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington. One represents the old guard and the strict obedience of the chain of command and procedure while the other stands for integrity and intellectual internalization of orders and their repercussions. Hackman is a fan of shooting first and asking questions later and Washington would rather make damn sure he’s pulling the trigger for the right reasons and in full accordance with the law before doing anything because he understands both the potential repercussions of this action and the responsibility placed upon him as a senior officer on the ship.  

I suppose you could, if you were so inclined, see this confrontation as a veiled metaphor for the clash between generations where the older cohort completely fails to empathize with the younger, more liberal and progressive one, and assumes the world should bend to their conservative will. It’s the age-old “When I was your age I just went to a place of work and asked if they had jobs and they gave me one, so why can’t you do it?” or “You could easily afford a house if you decided not to have an avocado on toast for lunch and cancelled your Netflix subscription” kind of clash where one party looks at the other with contempt because they present in their eyes as weak and spineless, while the younger respects the other’s experience and simply appeals to their empathy while elbowing for space in their domineering presence.  

However, what gives us the perspective to view this conflict as a proxy for a generational friction between filmmakers is likely bolstered—perhaps unwittingly and inadvertently—by the fact that the script was touched up by Quentin Tarantino who was a hot Hollywood commodity at the time Crimson Tide was being made. Not only did he have a personal relationship with Tony Scott, who acquired his debut script for True Romance and directed it with unparalleled flair, but he was also that young hot-blooded big swinging ding-dong on campus having come out with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, two back-to-back hits and cult classics in the making. He famously wrote and then disavowed the screenplay for Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, too. 

What Tarantino brought to Crimson Tide was first and foremost a breeze of freshness running through some elements of dialogue, not to mention a bunch of pop-culture references that are peppered throughout the script. Although I can’t fact-check my own assertions here and have to rely on third-party sources, it is widely acknowledged that Tarantino was responsible for the scene on the bus where James Gandolfini talks about classic submarine movies, as well as ones centered on the Silver Surfer supremacy and where Star Trek characters of Captain Kirk and Scottie are used to enhance the viewer immersion. I’d be also willing to bet a substantial sum of money that Tarantino also brought in the key final scene between Washington and Hackman where they talk about horses. It looks, feels and sounds like a wink to one of the greatest scenes Tarantino ever wrote, which happens to be the iconic showdown between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper in True Romance.  

In addition to giving Crimson Tide a nice and slick feel of a movie that is aware of the fact the audience watching it comprises of movie nerds who dig pop-cultural references and show up for meta-commentary, winks, nods and Easter eggs left behind by a nerdy filmmaker with an intimidating movie IQ, these touch-ups give the central conflict a plane of interpretation where what we are looking at is a clash between two generations of filmmakers. This isn’t exactly new as the fundamental idea of generations locking horns and movies commenting on the changing times have been with us for a long while. From Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard and Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve to Singin’ in the Rain, a handful of renditions of A Star is Born, The King of Comedy or The Artist, just to name a handful, movies always commented on the frequently violent-looking pageantry of the old making space for the arrival of the new. The talkies usurping power over silent movies. The New Hollywood burying the old world of musicals and sandal epics. And in the 90s, the hot-blooded Sundance generation coming over to replace the old guard of industrialized blockbusters of the 1980s.  

This is evident in Crimson Tide where Denzel Washington’s Hunter is mouthy, culture savvy, switched on, confident and effective. He’s the equivalent of an “Indiewood” filmmaker ready to take over Tinseltown and replace the aging Ramsey played by Hackman. If you needed more convincing, notice that the captain is frequently seen wearing a red cap, very much like the cap Tony Scott was known for wearing.  

Even though at the time of making this movie he was just turning fifty, Scott was emblematic of the old ways of doing things. He came of age as a director under Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer’s wing making such mainstream hits as Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop 2, The Last Boy Scout and Days of Thunder. His work epitomized the style adopted by Simpson, Bruckheimer and those who took over Hollywood after The New Hollywood crumbled under the combined weight of Apocalypse Now, Heaven’s Gate, Personal Best and Raging Bull. After the magic of Coppola, Scorsese, Friedkin and Schrader seemingly fizzled out and when Jaws and Star Wars signaled a tide reversal thanks to the fact their huge release came with massive price tags, studio heads leaned more heavily on audience testing, direct marketing, high concept storytelling that could be boiled down to a thirty-second TV spot and, hence, more predictable mode of business-driven moviemaking. All presumably in service of offsetting huge financial risks posed by these ballooning costs and then, eventually, in pursuit of total control of the filmmaking process. The post-New Hollywood conditions favored filmmaking where directors followed orders, respected the chain of command and focused on the job at hand instead of bringing their personal opinion to the workplace. It clearly worked in the 80s as big action movies came off the conveyor belt and made stars out of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson and Eddie Murphy.  

But as the 80s turned into the 90s and when audiences grew progressively more tired of seeing the same formulas repeated across the blockbuster landscape—from muscle men saving the planet and SNL icons goofing around in high concept comedies to buddy cop actioners and numerous sequels—just following orders wouldn’t cut it any longer. When filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, The Coen Brothers, Sam Raimi, Robert Rodriguez and others came to the fore thanks to the rise of the Sundance Festival and Miramax as the 90s equivalent of what in the 70s was epitomized by BBS and Paramount led by Robert Evans, the tide shifted and filmmaker’s voice took back control. Movies became more personal again. The director’s vision mattered. And, inspired by the pioneering work of Godard, Truffaut and the New Hollywood titans of homage-stroke-rip-off like Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese, pop-cultural and movie references became important elements to be reinserted into movies.  

Thus, Ramsey with his red cap is clearly a stand-in for the generation of mainstream Hollywood filmmakers who did as they were told and favored both the spectacle and advancing the studio brand more than their own personal signature. Meanwhile, Hunter represents that freewheeling New Hollywood Mark 2 bravado that breathed intellect into mainstream filmmaking once again. He’s the equivalent of a filmmaker who doesn’t just stage a scene and shoot in a particular way because that’s just how we do things here; he asks why the camera needs to be where it is. He wonders what the movie tells about the world, how it can be read and interpreted. Hunter doesn’t see the authentication of an order as a performative exercise in saying yes to things and reciting letters using the NATO phonetic alphabet, just as Tarantino and others didn’t make movies just to have a job making movies in Hollywood. For the new breed of filmmakers gaining prominence in the 90s the process of making movies wasn’t about blindly following orders and obeying the moguls like Joel Silver and Don Simpson. It was about doing what’s right for the story and making decisions that felt in line with what the filmmaker felt was best at the time and reflected their vision the most.

Sure, the ending of the movie suggests that both men were right in their own way and that the whole crisis aboard USS Alabama was a massive breakdown in communication and protocol, but when viewed through the lens I am suggesting, there is a clear victor here. Crimson Tide is undoubtedly a text commenting on the new wave of self-aware filmmakers swelling and crashing against the Hollywood shores. And if you think about it, Hunter is the one who comes out on top. Not only does his insistence on making sure their partial order was confirmed and disobeying the old dog Ramsey end up being the correct course of action, but also his people-first way with other officers and subordinates is what saves everyone in the end. He doesn’t talk down to his reports. He reasons with them and gets them to do their best work because he wants them to personally care about their jobs. He calls himself Captain Kirk and asks Scottie for more warp speed at the crucial moment when he needs his radioman to fix the device. He doesn’t hide behind his rank. And if he is to be seen as a director, he represents the kind of filmmaking that got tossed aside in the early 80s to make space for business-oriented and producer-driven mode of operation.  

And in the end, Ramsey retires early while Hunter is recommended to assume command of a submarine mission. This clearly reads as the old guard who ruled the roost in the 80s making space for the wave of new filmmakers to take over because their way of seeing how movies ought to be made is clearly superior and more in touch with what people want to see. In the 90s, young XOs coming out of Sundance were best positioned to take charge of Hollywood submarine missions and not risk the fate of the entire planet while doing so. And if you can wring this kind of discussion out of a movie like Crimson Tide, it is clearly a sign of greatness and, most importantly, timelessness.