I Miss Thrillers Like The Hunt for Red October. It’s a Classic for a Good Reason

Chesapeake Bay. Not far from the city of Annapolis, Maryland

Some words would simply look better in a bright green font on an old screen, with computers humming in the background. Just like the description of the setting in the movie The Hunt for Red October. I'm aware that this wasn't the first or last show to use this solution, but here, it fit perfectly. The movie created a tense atmosphere and took us to various corners of the world. The creator of Predator and Die Hard, John McTiernan, perfectly understood the quintessence of technothrillers in 1990 and reflected all their advantages in one of the best films of that time.

Passion of an everyday insurance agent

Technothrillers are further divided into different subgenres, depending on whether they focus on science, IT, science fiction, or the military. The Hunt for Red October successfully combines themes of espionage and military tech (with an emphasis on the latter). The original story recounting the escape from a Soviet ship to the USA came from the master of technothrillers himself – Tom Clancy. The famous writer didn't invent the genre, he wasn't its precursor. However, along with Michael Crichton, he popularized it and helped transition it from a niche to the mainstream.

The Hunt for Red October, John McTiernan, Paramount Pictures, 1990.

Clancy's passion, in contrast to Crichton, who focused more on modern science, was military equipment. As an ordinary insurance agent, he relied only on publicly available information, and even so, his knowledge in this field was above average. Apparently, one admiral read The Hunt... in the 1980s, and he shouted, "Who the hell gave permission to publish this book?!" Some sensitive information is also present in the film adaptation.

Human face of a soulless machine

We still remember the excellent roles of Sean Connery as Captain Marko Ramius, Scott Glen as the commander of the USS Dallas, and, of course, Alec Baldwin, who in this story was a perfect fit for the character of Jack Ryan – an ordinary analyst working behind a desk. But it cannot be denied that the main character here was also the Red October itself – a Soviet Typhoon-class submarine. The producers showcased it to us in all its glory through underwater shots, accurately rendering the shape of this unit. They also provided technical details about its silent magnetohydrodynamic drive.

So, we rooted not only for Connery and Neil to succeed in their escape, but also for the Red October. The titular machine was partnered by the equally impressive USS Dallas – an American Los-Angeles class submarine. We could witness a game of hide and seek with the October and perhaps the movie’s most impressive scene, where USS Dallas emerged from the water at full speed like a leaping whale. The team of characters of veritable steel also had its antagonist in the form of the Konovalov ship, which was indeed hunting for October, which every viewer wanted to see at the bottom of the ocean.

The Hunt for Red October, John McTiernan, Paramount Pictures, 1990.

In the meantime, we visited an aircraft carrier with a few sequences of takeoffs and landings. There was also a dramatic sequence of Ryan's helicopter flight to the deck of USS Dallas, during which there was discussion about a special fuel reserve for times of war. There were also dialogues where nobody translated the names of Soviet ship classes or the jargon of soldiers, as well as sonar screens with mysterious stripes instead of made up, "idiot-proof" graphics. The essence of a technothriller is that, alongside human fates and dramas, it depicts numerous details about seemingly soulless machines, presenting them in an interesting way that gives them a certain kind of personality.

Films that take viewers seriously

Tom Clancy's focus on military equipment details made his stories particularly credible and genuine. We watched Hollywood fiction that could have been based entirely, or partially, on facts. There was no Marvel exaggeration, like in Top Gun: Maverick. Instead of feeling that the filmmakers were treating the audience like idiots, we rather had the impression they were trying to educate, convey interesting knowledge, and let us peek into secret, inaccessible places, like the hull of a submarine.

It's a shame that a film adaptation of Tom Clancy's perhaps most epic technothriller – the book Red Storm Rising about the clash between NATO and the Warsaw Pact on European soil – never happened. Instead, we had samples, like Firefox with Clint Eastwood in 1982, with a fairly similar story about an attempt to steal a super-modern Soviet fighter jet, or later ones, which, however, were closer to typical action cinema. The most memorable was Executive Decision with Kurt Russel and Steven Seagal, with a spaceship-like F-117 fighter jet, Broken Arrow with John Travolta, about an American bomber losing nuclear warheads, and Flight of Black Angel.

The Hunt for Red October, John McTiernan, Paramount Pictures, 1990.

Successive screen adaptations of Jack Ryan's adventures were good spy thrillers and action films, but they lacked the technology element. There's probably a little bit of the fault in the source novels, but – if I remember correctly – the book The Sum of All Fears still contained some military details, which were already missing in the film with Ben Affleck. The best spiritual heir to The Hunt for Red October and technothrillers is probably Crimson Tide from 1995, directed by Tony Scott and starring the great Gene Hackman – also as a submarine commander.

That ship has already sailed away

Today, it seems that Red October screened centuries ago, disappeared into the mist, and with it all technothrillers, although Jack Ryan is doing well. In subsequent seasons of the series, Amazon plays with a mix of James Bond and Ethan Hunt. Although I still associate John Krasinski with the anemic Jim from The Office, who would have also been a good choice for Ryan from Red October.

The popularity of technothrillers was likely boosted by the Cold War and Gulf War when the news channels were overflowing with images and technical names of military equipment. Similar trends could be seen at that time in mainstream computer games, which weren't afraid to inundate the player with technical terminology, mysterious shortcuts, and making use of the entire keyboard. However, I don't think this will happen in the world of movies, even though games of this kind have survived somewhere in their niche and continue to return in new forms. Technothrillers will continue to exist, incorporating elements of science fiction, futuristic technologies, and espionage. Unfortunately, films like The Hunt for Red October, in Tom Clancy's style, will probably never return.

Darius Matusiak

Darius Matusiak

Graduate of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Journalism. He started writing about games in 2013 on his blog on gameplay.pl, from where he quickly moved to the Reviews and Editorials department of Gamepressure. Sometimes he also writes about movies and technology. A gamer since the heyday of Amiga. Always a fan of races, realistic simulators and military shooters, as well as games with an engaging plot or exceptional artistic style. In his free time, he teaches how to fly in modern combat fighter simulators on his own page called Szkola Latania. A huge fan of arranging his workstation in the "minimal desk setup" style, hardware novelties and cats.