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Wolf's Call - Le Chant Du Loup - submarine movie (2019)

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.

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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):


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Bonus, virtual visit of a modern French SSBN: http://visites.colsbleus.fr/visites/snle.html
 
Honestly, I was not be disappointed by this movie. Great quality!
Yeah... some mistakes (technical and FX issues) during the introduction scene, as Rufus said.

The story seems to focus on the nuclear deterrence and the French command hierarchy. It is very instructive if you want to know!

It looks like two majors movies : Fail Safe (1964) and By Dawn's Early Light (1990), same ambiance and consequence. But, contrary to these two references, Le Chant du Loup is about the French Strategic Ocean Force and not the Strategic Air Forces.

So, I would recommand to see it. It is always good to watch another cultural point of view. :)


8 out of 10.
 
It's quite alright, we have a cunning plan.
I do believe you'll appreciate the movie, though. It's much more Russian in its mindset than most sub movies. Consider it as intel-gathering, all the vocabulary used is correct French submariner slang and most of the extras are active submariners themselves. :p
 
Pretty good I guess. I liked how it turns the plot around in the middle of the film and how it sets up the finale. Pretty intense stuff.

That chopper scene was pretty bad though, and the
jihad
thing was really farfetched.

Also who in the fuck blows smoke into someone else's face like that? Well I guess it did kind of pay off in the end...

Also why do they get told to stay away from the computer monitors when the kabooms are happening? So they don't get Star Trek'd?
 
That chopper scene was pretty bad though, and the
jihad
thing was really farfetched.
The initial scene made some people roll their eyes indeed, but then, I've seen crazier in action movies. I guess it's the 'establishing character moment' for the CO, and it's pretty obvious during the scene later with ALFOST that hey got away with this shit because the geopolitical situation became particularly fucked up and the political backlash was on the backburner. The admiral appreciated the balls and needed someone right here, right now, to deploy woth the SSBN, so he took his decision.
Also who in the fuck blows smoke into someone else's face like that? Well I guess it did kind of pay off in the end...
Apparently, that girl. :p
Also why do they get told to stay away from the computer monitors when the kabooms are happening? So they don't get Star Trek'd?
Better safe than sorry. It's real-world procedures, at least in the French Navy. In combat situation, people put fire-retardant caps as well as gloves and goggles, all of which designed to prevent glass debris and other flying objects to incapacitate people. It's the first movie I saw where this procedure is actually shown. Same for the duct taping of screens, it makes for prevention of complete fragmentation. Turned out to be unnecessary in that first scene, but better safe than sorry.

2508

Keep also in mind that the SSN in the movie is pretty old, built in the early Eighties, meaning some of the screens will be CRT. Contrast with the late 2000s SSBN, and most importantly, CRT screens can break with shards more easily, so if something goes Star Trek because a flying object goes in a screen at high speed, you can likely end up'with your weapon operator getting a shard in his eye. Here, pic taken from an anti-air frigate CIC:

2507

It's not Hollywood or Star Trek: the bridge crew does what is necessary to survive near misses.
 

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You're sure about this ?
The Netflix deal was for North America and a few other regions. Grab it in Blu-ray at the Fnac here instead: it comes with a really interesting making-of documentary showing how they made the underwater shots or how they built the SSN model on a 1:1 scale for the command center.
 
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