Purppuravyöhyke

Denzel and Gene are the perfect choices for the leads. The score is simply amazing and deserves the Oscar. But anyway during the after texts i felt relief. 1.45 h of submarine command language can take its toll and be pretty indigestible.

The only thing that prevents me from putting a solid 8 out of 10 for this effort from Tony Scott are the totally unnecessary racial remarks made by Hackmans character captain Ramsey at the end of the movie. The Lipizzaner dialog could easily have been replaced with something else. It was very irritating and ridiculous simply because if Ramsey had preferences in skin color, he wouldn't have chosen a black man as an X.O. in the first place, right?

The served purpose was of course to help the viewer to take sides in the conflict but the audience had already done that. The audience had already understood that Ramsey associated Hunter with Harvard and military school theory and that he thought of him as a softy. The moment Hunter takes control of the conn, the sympathies lies with him.

Ramsey with his happy trigger-finger and "shoot first ask questions later" attitude was the stereotype perhaps needed to push some moral points about the problems with blind obedience and the ever recurring need of critical thought (especially amongst men in control of nukes). The audience got it, but to make sure the viewers didn't have any sympathies for the old commie-hater he must be throwing some racial epithets too. The choice in making characters over explicitly bad is quite common in Hollywood though, but more often than not the drama itself suffers from this practice. Characters made more shallow and one-dimensional, who wants that except the studio bosses? If they dumb it down and keep it within the stereotypes maybe they think it's easier to go break even, who knows? But in the same way as the US military can be saved from personnel like Ramsey maybe a well educated middle class one day can save the world from risk reducing studio bosses by demanding a dismantling of the stereotypes we all cherished and consumed for too long.