It's Complicated: A Review of "Crimson Tide" (1995)
In this review, Roberts praises 'Crimson Tide' for its ability to entertain; it is as simple and as complicated as that
Entertainment has an ambivalent connotation among film critics--more often than not, the critic of these days is a hypocrite, because they will pan a movie for being 'mere entertainment' while using only entertainment as a criterion for judging movies. Much like the terms 'popular', 'art', and 'irony', the word 'entertainment' is debased. What anyone means by it is, truly, anyone's guess.
To me, the word 'entertainment' is not a pejorative. As I am prone to do, I tend to consider the etymology of a word; 'entertain' comes from a mix of Latin and Old French that comes to mean 'to hold together, to support'--to me, an entertaining movie is one that can hold its elements together in an productive way (or, hopefully, an interesting way). The dialogue, the setting, the characters, the plot, the technics of cameras and choreography…what one must understand about every fiction is that a fictional story, in whatever medium, is an ecosystem. Different aspects come together and bring forth a story--a place for the character to live, the dialogue to be spoken, the drama to be staged.
I am of the opinion that the 1990's, in American cinema, was a decades long streak of near perfection--that is, with some exceptions, the movies of the 1990's were perfect entertainment. I can name a few off the top of my head that come to mind: Scent of a Woman (1992), Independence Day (1996), The Edge (1997), Good Will Hunting (1997)...there are many examples, but one of these movies, perhaps a gem among diamonds, is Crimson Tide (1995), the submarine melodrama starring Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington.
Crimson Tide is a movie I saw with my father, when we would have our ritual 'early Sunday morning' movie watches; usually, because the movie was a violent one, and my father wanted to show it to me without my mother's objections. Marriage is a wonderful institution, and like living in an institution, it helps produce the most interesting pathologies. And one of those was this ritual.
Often, when I watched a movie on a Sunday morning, there was a demand for complete silence. No questions, no running commentary, no statement of opinions; you were to rely on the narrative and only the narrative to tell you about the movie. And when I watched Crimson Tide in the holy silence of a Sunday morning, I experienced a movie that needed no commentary.
It only begged for an audience.
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Crimson Tide belongs to a genre of movies that are, to be generous, a multa admixta of quality. Most military movies are studies in plastic tropes; the hero with a band of roguish fools who oppose the Bad Guy (™) whose designs can only be stopped by CrossFit GI Joes and their guns. Someone dies to give the group some cohesion (God knows it can't be found in the chemistry…that would require acting) and a rage-filled, absurd plan comes together and the good guys win, because the Bad Guy (™) is nothing without his (or her) henchmen.
Some military movies, however, transcend this, due mostly to some kind of grounded approach; one might think of Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn or, to pick from the various submarine movies we have, The Hunt for Red October; that is to say, the grounding effect comes from some semblance of history. The Hunt for Red October, for example, was inspired by a melding of events like the mutiny aboard the Soviet frigate Storozhevoy, as well as the submarine K-129 which went missing. In Herzog's movie, the story is taken from the account of an American pilot Dieter Dengler, who was shot down and taken prisoner during the Vietnam War.
The beauty of Crimson Tide, and what makes it such a wonderful movie to me, is that this movie is a dramatization and creative appropriation of the events on the B-59 Soviet submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis. While not an exact re-telling (I know, Americans only want 'factual' fiction…), Crimson Tide takes this historical event and transports them to the 1990s, where the supposedly defender of freedom, the American Navy, is put into a situation where its biggest enemy is itself.
As anyone who knows me would tell you, dear reader, I am something of a fan of Vasili Arkhipov, the man whom Denzel Washington's Lt. Ron Hunter is a pastiche of. And so the telling of this movie is of interest in this way. Its plot is similar to what happened on the B-59 during the Cuban Missile Crisis; a submarine is dispatched to watch a nation with both nuclear weapons and a vague intention to use them, the submarine loses communication with its commanders (in this case, Washington, D.C., not Moscow), the captain wishes to use the nuclear weapons with the belief that a nuclear war has begun, the submarine is attacked and seemingly confirms those fears, and a mutiny takes place to stop the use of nuclear weapons.
But the genius of this movie, produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Tony Scott, is that while there exists a skeleton of inspiration, the meat of the movie is born of a creative orchestra between well developed characters, beautiful dialogue, and one of the most interesting uses of foreshadowing I have ever seen. What I like most is where the director takes creative license and brings to bear the art of cinema onto such a scenario.
For example: the tensions between Ron Hunter and his captain, Captain Frank Ramsey (played by Gene Hackman), are not given a mere one pump foreshadowing, as is the rule nowadays. The foreshadowing is subtle, it is used multiple times, and it is not used to define the relationship between these characters in some absolute, definitive way. When they first meet at the beginning of the movie, Ramsey and Frank are staged in a visually contradicting way: Hunter is dressed formally, in his Service Dress Blues, whereas Ramsey is in his rumpled Peanut Butters. The dialogue is also fairly contentious, showing a respectable Hunter being poked fun at by Ramsey, who constantly keeps undercutting him, such as when he tells Hunter he was at the top of a list, only to add mockingly: 'It was a short list.'
This tension is then undercut by Ramsey's dog, who approaches Hunter with a wagging tail--and, Ramsey notes, with approval of Hunter. The dog, Bear, is a Jack Russell Terrier; the smartest dog alive, so Ramsey claims, but there is something else about Jack Russell terriers that Ramsey leaves out; Jack Russell terriers were initially bred as ratters. By the time Hunter and Ramsey shake hands, one wonders what it all means: is the dog approving of Hunter, or saying he is a 'rat'? Did the dog make Ramsey's decision for him, or was this a sort of heavy symbolism that hides that Ramsey had made up his mind? The point of foreshadowing is to confuse as much as reveal, if you are any good at it: the nature of the relationship between Ramsey and Hunter is revealed as contentious--but one wonders in what way this will be so. And that hooks the viewer.
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It has become increasingly rare, in books and movies, for dialogue to be any good. Most of the time, directors and their audiences believe in an absolute faithfulness to the lingua franca, the 'common language' which is 'authentic'. And, most of the time, I spend my life wishing that a deity would put me in charge of writing the dialogue of the common, authentic folk; I would do so with a greater creativity than most 'authentic' folk could muster in two lifetimes. If, of course, they tried to speak something other than mumbled grunts.
Crimson Tide, however, has a wonderful dialogue that mixes the demotic, conversational style with moments of what I call cinematic aperçu. The most obvious and perhaps the best display of this dialogue is the famous officer's dinner, where much like the beginning when Hunter first meets Ramsey, we watch Ramsey poke and prod Hunter about the nature of war. We all do (or should) know the most obvious brilliance of this scene, which is when Hunter rebuts Ramsey traipsing out of Von Clausewitz by saying that,
"In my humble opinion, in a nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself."
But this brilliance blinds us to the superb nature of the entire scene. The scene begins with the viewer being dropped into a dinner table debate about the Russian rebel Radchenko, and one officer says he is a potential Hitler and someone should just shoot him. He is responded to by another officer who says 'fanatics make history', mentioning that General George Patton was a fanatic. A seemingly deep insight is responded to by a shrill, but common, fallacy: 'So you think this guy is Patton?'
This is followed up by someone noting that Radchenko is a 'dangerous lunatic who is threatening nuclear war', which is followed by the question 'what does that make us?', referring to the United States, since we 'are the only nation to drop a nuclear bomb on anyone?' To this, we get a quick, almost funny response: '...a prime target.'
This part leads up to Ramsey asking Hunter if he thinks dropping the atomic bomb was a mistake, but I maintain that the potency of Ramsey and Hunter conversation relies on the entertaining confusion of the conversation between the officers. One sees the dialogue chiseling out the characters of each of the officers, but one also is shown something else; that not only has no one learned any lessons from the Cold War or World War II (or, it might be implied, any previous war at all) but that we cannot even agree on what that lesson might be. It sets the stage for the conflicting opinions of Ramsey and Hunter.
The conversation between Ramsey and Hunter, in the midst of this confusion, does more than foreshadow future conflict; it reveals the contradictions in the characters themselves. Hunter, either on purpose or accident, is presented as a theoretical and 'complicated' person, particularly at this dinner. Ramsey, by his own admission, presents himself as a 'simple sonofabitch' who knows the how, but not the 'why'. And yet, what does Ramsey do when he is confronting Hunter on the morality of the dropping of the atom bomb? He cites Von Clausewitz. And Hunter's response is devoid of name dropping some thinker or theory; Hunter states his opinion.
This scene and the dialogue that goes with it is central to the rest of the movie; what is expressed by each person, officers included, is transformed from a throwaway opinion to a hypothetical question to defining how each person reacts when the mutiny takes place. It is a moment that you do not realize defines the characters until they are deep into the tensions aboard the submarine. The contradictions within Hunter and Ramsey are revealed, and each is forced to act in the face of their dilemmas, often contradicting themselves in the process.
The dialogue reveals this beautifully. Combined with incredible acting, interesting camera angles, as well as the soundtrack from Hans Zimmer, Crimson Tide captures your attention, and one feels that they too are on a submarine they cannot leave.
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While immensely entertaining and well rounded, beyond this Crimson Tide is fairly average. In some ways, if you know what it is based on, one sees a sort of accidental critique of the American military; that we are no more superior or competent than the Russian counterparts this movie was based on. The movie also strips its plot of any moralism, which I appreciate; every high ideal is laughed at. It is a truly imaginative exercise in turning the tables on American assumptions about the military.
The ending is interesting in how cryptic it is, not hoisting a 'lesson' onto the viewer. The captains meet at a military tribunal which states that 'no one was at fault' officially. Unofficially, the tribunal reprimands Hunter and Ramsey for not resolving their differences (which, truly, means they did not resolve their own contradictions we saw at the dinner). The men meet outside the tribunal and Ramsey admits that Hunter was right--about the Lipizzan horses being from Spain, a minor argument they had during the crisis. Ramsey retires and Hunter gets command of his own ship. Nothing is settled, nothing is learned--just as it had been at the beginning.
While being a superb work of cinema by not preaching to its audience, Crimson Tide doesn't have anything to say about anything; the human condition is a prop for the plot, the conflict between captain and X.O. is more melodramatic than transformative. The discussions of politics or war are, again, in service of the plot, the characters, and the drama. This is not a bad thing; it merely means that Crimson Tide is entertaining, but with nothing to illuminate and no one to elevate.
It is entertainment. Great entertainment. One might even call it art--but as Captain Ramsey might say, I am not calling it art; I am saying it's complicated.