Rufus Shinra
Well-known member
I just came back from an early screening of one of these rarities, submarine movies: Le Chant Du Loup, which apparently will be released later in English as Wolf's Call.
It's a rarity among rarities as it is a good submarine movie. Not Red October's perfection, but a really good and advisable movie.
The main character is a sonar operator, one of these handful of sonar operators who has a perfect ear, the kind of guy who will - as in real life - identify individual ships and submarines down to the specific hull, in a French Rubis-class SSN, in the near future when a crisis with Russia is getting hot (sorry, @Kinetic, but you're still the geopolitical bad guys, though the movie has the decency of being quite more complex than that) and the operator makes a mistake that sets up the crisis to a breaking point. Much moreso than movies such as Crimson Tide, it is about the cogs in the machines, more specifically the deterrence machine rather than the opposition of a couple of big name actors in a submarine set. It is, first and foremost, a French war movie, which means a way of doing and showing things quite different from US movies. Think more Pierre Schoendoerffer's movies such as The Anderson Platoon, Dien-Bien-Phu or The 317th Platoon, about sailors and their duty. It makes technical mistakes (notably in a surface ship near the beginning of the movie, but that's definitely forgiveable considering that they would not have had access to the type of ship in question), making it a bit under Red October in overall quality, but is excellent nonetheless and a huge hit in the gut at the end in the tradition of French war movies: there is no happy end, just survivors, memories and lost friends.
Trailer (in French, I suppose YT will generate local subs wherever you are):
Bonus, virtual visit of a modern French SSBN: http://visites.colsbleus.fr/visites/snle.html
It's a rarity among rarities as it is a good submarine movie. Not Red October's perfection, but a really good and advisable movie.
The main character is a sonar operator, one of these handful of sonar operators who has a perfect ear, the kind of guy who will - as in real life - identify individual ships and submarines down to the specific hull, in a French Rubis-class SSN, in the near future when a crisis with Russia is getting hot (sorry, @Kinetic, but you're still the geopolitical bad guys, though the movie has the decency of being quite more complex than that) and the operator makes a mistake that sets up the crisis to a breaking point. Much moreso than movies such as Crimson Tide, it is about the cogs in the machines, more specifically the deterrence machine rather than the opposition of a couple of big name actors in a submarine set. It is, first and foremost, a French war movie, which means a way of doing and showing things quite different from US movies. Think more Pierre Schoendoerffer's movies such as The Anderson Platoon, Dien-Bien-Phu or The 317th Platoon, about sailors and their duty. It makes technical mistakes (notably in a surface ship near the beginning of the movie, but that's definitely forgiveable considering that they would not have had access to the type of ship in question), making it a bit under Red October in overall quality, but is excellent nonetheless and a huge hit in the gut at the end in the tradition of French war movies: there is no happy end, just survivors, memories and lost friends.
Trailer (in French, I suppose YT will generate local subs wherever you are):
Bonus, virtual visit of a modern French SSBN: http://visites.colsbleus.fr/visites/snle.html