The original idea for Crimson Tide could have taken a much-loved 90s blockbuster in an entirely different direction. We look at what course it might have set…
Among the pulpy blockbusters of the 1990s, you can’t get much more high concept and intense than Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide. As we discuss on Film Stories Network podcast At the Movies in the 90s, it’s a riveting post-Cold War geopolitical melodrama.
The premise, which takes place in a post-Soviet Russia reeling into instability, is a thrilling one. It sees a rogue leader gain control of nuclear missiles, while the crew of an American submarine, the USS Alabama, is thrown into a tense dilemma. They receive half of a message which seems to suggest they need to launch a strike on Russian targets before they have a chance to fire on the USA.
Old-school, hawkish ship’s captain Ramsey (Gene Hackman) believes they must strike, whereas his new, younger executive officer (or XO), Hunter (Denzel Washington), wants to gain the complete message to ensure they’re doing the right thing. A conflict over rules soon morphs into a moral and ideological one, as Hunter relieves Ramsey of duty, a mutiny ensues, and the crew splits into two opposing camps. Meanwhile, the clock to nuclear Armageddon runs down.
At the risk of spoiling a 30 year-old film, right and logic wins out, though as a Naval admiral (played by Jason Robards) points out, “you were both right… and you were both wrong.” The Navy has to reconcile the fact that a disagreement between two commanders with the power to launch nuclear missiles brought the world closer to destruction than they will ever know.
Scott’s film even ends with a bit of text, pointing out that Naval rules changed during the Clinton administration, so that only the President has the final authority to launch a strike in a situation such as this. The call would no longer fall to two men in a claustrophobic tin can, hundreds of miles under the depths. This disclaimer nonetheless points to the Navy’s anxiety about the depiction of such a crucial facet of their nuclear apparatus, even in the calmer seas of the mid-1990s.
The Navy was even more nervous about the original concept. Hollywood Pictures producer duo Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer were noodling with a story in the early 1990s which would reputedly have seen a nuclear submarine – fitted with an advanced computer system – potentially triggering World War III. It then fell to the sub’s crew to try to avert disaster. It all sounds a bit like artificially-intelligent Entity in 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, and would undoubtedly have seemed rather far-fetched to audiences in the early 90s.
Nonetheless, the Navy wanted to prove that such a scenario was impossible with the established protocols and technologies available. And so, in 1993, Simpson, Bruckheimer, Scott, their president of production Ricardo Mestres, and screenwriters Michael Schiffer and Richard Henrick were all invited to board the USS Florida, a nuclear sub based in Bangor, Washington State. The movie-makers filmed executive officer William Toti issuing similar commands and actions we will later see Hunter deliver, adding to Crimson Tide’s air of authenticity in the dialogue and interactions of the crew (outside of the mutiny, of course).
Toti walked them all through sea procedures and the process of a missile launch before the Florida dropped the filmmakers off. Afterwards, the Navy felt confident that this glimpse of life aboard a nuclear submarine life and would dissuade the producers that from making a movie which suggested that US technology could destroy the world. On that front, they were successful. What they didn’t count on was the story Hollywood Pictures would pivot toward: that of a Toti-like character disobeying a recalcitrant senior officer.
For this, the team at Hollywood Pictures had a genuine precedent, unlike the idea of a rogue computer system, which back then was firmly in the realm of science fiction. The new story for Crimson Tide had its roots in the best-known nuclear near-miss: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. After America placed nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy, the Soviets responded in kind by doing the same in Cuba, fearful of the Kennedy administration’s plans to invade the country and kick out Fidel Castro’s Communist regime.
Kennedy launched a blockade of American ships to prevent Soviet missiles reaching Castro, and while he and his Soviet opposite, Nikita Khrushchev, finally worked out a solution after two tense weeks that October, the nuclear Doomsday clock very nearly struck midnight. It’s even more terrifying when you factor in Vasily Arkhipov: a man whose actions, had they been different, could have meant that none of us would be here today.
Yes, Crimson Tide’s chief inspiration point for the mutiny storyline wasn’t an American crisis in command, but a Russian one. In 1962, the Soviet submarine Foxtrot B-29 had been cut off from Moscow during the blockade, and its commander believed war had broken out. Arkhipov was one of two fellow officers who had to agree before a nuclear torpedo was launched, and ultimately served as the only crew member who believed that the captain, Valentin Grigorevitch Savitsky, was wrong in his determination to fire on an American target.
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If Savitsky was the Ramsey analogue, so Arkhipov was Hunter’s, the rational figure who believed they had to surface to periscope depth and learn exactly what was going on. With the B-29’s batteries low, Savitsky agreed – under pressure from Arkhipov – to return to the surface. At which point he learned that talks were happening and the storm clouds of war were receding. It didn’t take a mutiny to avert disaster, but Crimson Tide certainly borrowed the idea of a second in command refusing to follow his captain’s orders for the greater good.
With the mutiny narrative set, Hollywood Pictures went back to the Navy, who were mightily displeased at the new storyline. They refused to lend any assistance to the production of Tony Scott’s film, forcing them to gain support from the French Navy for the use of an aircraft carrier. The scuttled USS Barbel was used for scenes where the crew needed to be near a visible, real-life vessel. With some irony, after the Navy’s refusal to help, and in need of a scene showing a submarine being put to sea, Scott’s team pitched up at Pearl Harbor to capture footage of a departing ship.
The name of this vessel? The USS Alabama.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts and books, via Linktr.ee here. Don’t miss him on At the Movies in the 90s on the Film Stories Podcast Network too.
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