Crimson Tide (Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Hollywood Pictures, Buena Vista Distribution, 1995)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The other movie my husband Charles and I watched on Sunday, January 4 was considerably better than The Chairman: Crimson Tide, a 1995 military thriller about the crew of a nuclear-powered submarine, the U.S.S. Alabama, who are faced with the dilemma of whether to carry out a nuclear strike against a Russian port or hold off on doing so. Crimson Tide was produced by the late Don Simpson – a real Hollywood basket case with an insatiable appetite for women and drugs (one of his weirdest eccentricities was the only pants he ever wore were black jeans, and he would only wear each pair once because once they were laundered, he didn’t think they were black enough for him) and his still-living partner, Jerry Bruckheimer. After a falling-out with Paramount, where they’d made Top Gun (1985), the two Beverly Hills Cop movies, Flashdance and other major hits, they decamped to Hollywood Pictures, a sub-label of Disney. Crimson Tide was their third and last film for Disney (though they’d go on to make one more, The Rock, for Columbia before Bruckheimer broke up their partnership in 1995 and Simpson died of a drug overdose a year later) and was another major hit for them, especially since they got their Top Gun director, Tony Scott, to make it. The plot deals with an extended months-long cruise of the U.S.S. Alabama under crusty old captain Frank Ramsey (Gene Hackman) and his executive officer, or “XO,” Ron Hunter (Denzel Washington, top-billed), a last-minute replacement for a colleague with appendicitis, as they undertake a cross-Pacific cruise to confront and, if necessary, attack a group of Russian rebels led by Vladimir Radchenko (Daniel von Bargan). Radchenko’s forces have captured the city of Vladivostok on Russia’s east coast and with it a fleet of nuclear submarines and a land-based missile base with which they could attack the United States or Japan. At first the U.S. wasn’t particularly worried about this since the launch codes for the missiles were safely in the hands of the Russian government in Moscow (this was during the period between the fall of Mikhail Gorbachev and the rise of Vladimir Putin, which I sometimes refer to as “The Modern Time of Troubles,” an allusion to the unsettled decade or two in Russian history between the death of Ivan the Terrible and the takeover of General Mikhail Romanov, whose dynasty lasted 300 years until the 1917 revolution). Later they learn that Radchenko’s people have hacked the launch codes, so his threats to attack the West with nuclear weapons are real.

The Alabama submerges to cross the Pacific to meet this threat, and composer Hans Zimmer deploys a pre-existing religious work for orchestra and chorus, John B. Dykes’s “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” (lyrics by William Whiting), which gives the impression that a sub actually submerging is a religious ritual. In their first scene together Ramsey forces Hunter to smoke a cigar – Scott’s straight-on shot of Gene Hackman with a cigar in his mouth couldn’t help but remind me of Stanley Kubrick’s introduction of Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove, another movie about the world hurtling to the brink of nuclear war. The conflict between them starts seeming awfully like The Caine Mutiny, starting with a fire in the mess (the ship’s kitchen) caused by a heavy-set Black cook, Rono (Mark Christopher Lawrence), of whom Ramsey had joked as he was boarding the sub, “How can they fit all of him in?” While Hunter is busy leading the firefighting crew, Ramsey suddenly calls an attack drill and orders Hunter to leave the mess and come to the bridge even though the fire might still be burning. Ramsey justifies this by saying that a real attack could come at any time and the crew members need to be ready and able to drop whatever they’re doing to respond to it. Just after that Rono suffers a heart attack, is taken to the sick bay, and dies. Later the sub is attacked by a Russian rebel Akula-class sub, and though the sub is able to make most of the torpedoes miss through so-called “countermeasures” (bits of metal launched from the sub under attack to divert the sonar-controlled torpedoes to hit the countermeasures instead of the main ship), one torpedo hits and knocks out both the Alabama’s nuclear motors and its communications with the outside world. Before the torpedo hit the crew received an Emergency Action Message (EAM) ordering the sub to fire its nuclear missiles at the Vladivostok base as a pre-emptive strike against Radchenko’s nuclear capability. As the torpedo hit the Alabama was in the process of receiving a second EAM, but only the heading had come in when the ship was hit and its communication devices went down. Acting like Lt. Tom Keefer in Herman Wouk’s 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny (played by Fred MacMurray in the 1954 film), Hunter first refuses to give his necessary consent to the attack and then orders Ramsey confined to quarters and takes over the ship under Navy regulations. Ultimately, however, Ramsey is able to stage a counter-mutiny, retake command, and confine Hunter to his quarters. In the end both Ramsey and Hunter end up on the bridge, with each of their followers pointing guns at the others.

Racing to fix the ship’s radio, Russell Vossler (Lillo Brancato) gets the second EAM, which turned out to be an order canceling the first attack order because the Russian government had attacked Radchenko’s forces and retaken the missile base. There’s a follow-up scene at the Board of Inquiry at Pearl Harbor (which gives us a welcome return to the outdoors after we’ve spent most of that movie trapped inside that sub!), where Rear Admiral Anderson (Jason Robards, Jr. – an ironic presence since the night before Charles and I had watched The Second Woman, in which Jason Robards, Sr. had had a small role) rules that both men were right and both were wrong. Ultimately Anderson decides to allow Ramsey to “retire” from the Navy with full honors and pay, and promises Hunter a sub command of his own the next time one becomes available. Though it’s not a ground-breaking movie in any way, Crimson Tide is an excellent thriller, well written by Michael Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick, with plenty of suspense points to keep us in doubt as to the outcome. One issue that arises is that without power the sub is in danger of sinking below 1,850 feet, the so-called “crush depth” at which the water pressure will literally crush the hull, sink the sub, and kill everyone on board. Another is the scene in which Hunter has to decide whether to seal the bilge tank, ruptured during the Akula attack, to save the ship even though doing so means killing the sailors still inside it. Crimson Tide is an excellent action film, and I write this as someone who usually doesn’t like military thrillers and I’d probably never have watched it if I hadn’t been assigned to review the soundtrack album (which is quite stunning; for all the nasty jokes I’ve made about Hans Zimmer, whom I call “the room man” because Zimmer is the German word for “room,” he was on top of his game here and he was able to make the score sound unified enough that we don’t get the “a little bit of this, a little bit of that” impression we all too often get from albums of film scores), but I’m glad I got the chance to see it. It’s certainly a much better movie than my memory of Top Gun, largely because the characters have real depth and complexity and the outcome is far from predictable. Charles made the comment that at least we knew in advance the missiles wouldn’t be launched because we don’t live in a post-nuclear war apocalyptic world, and we thought for a while about movies that actually end with the destruction of the earth by nuclear weapons. We could come up with only two: Dr. Strangelove and Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), the first Planet of the Apes sequel (and later we stumbled on a YouTube video about Beneath the Planet of the Apes which revealed that Charlton Heston’s non-negotiable demand for his participation was that it have an apocalyptic ending that would make sure there wasn’t a third film in the series … though there was), though there were certainly a number of films (Five, On the Beach, The Day After, Testament) about the handful of survivors that would be left after a nuclear war.