One of the sergeants in my ROTC cadre in college was with the 101st ABN at Hamburger Hill and he thought it was the most realistic Vietnam movie he’d ever seen.
You know, when they were reading off the serial numbers, I nitpicked, “Hey, why aren’t those numbers sequential?” But I forget about that by the time the bloodshed resumed.
For some reason, I was most appalled by the soldiers’ using their rifles to bludgeon each other to death. The shooting and stabbing, I was sort of ready for. But the amount of brute-force clubbing caught me off-guard.
Really good movie, but the way.
I don’t see how that is either realistic or an action movie.
Mid-19th century firearms didn’t always have serial numbers (but many did), but what most Military firearms did have was a “Rack Number”- a kind of serial number applied (usually on the buttstock) by the military so that firearms stored in the armoury could be identified and accounted for- after all, as any shooter or collector can tell you, one Springfield or Enfield Musket looks very much like another. So I wouldn’t say it’s unrealistic for Civil War era firearms to have a serial number, albeit in the form of a military “rack number”.
Although I’m not an expert, that is EXACTLY how I can see the events unfolding in a situation like that. Hauntingly familiar, imho.
When something similar happened in North Hollywood in real life, I really don’t remember much criticism of the police for initially engaging the bank robbers, but lots and lots of discussion about LAPD being inadequately armed. Especially when police on the scene resolved the problem during the firefight themselves. Not by going to the SWAT armory, mind you (although SWAT was on the scene as well), but going to the neighborhood gun shop and buying semiautomatic rifles. Although, to be fair, the shootout was over well before lunchtime.
Funny thing is I always got my dates confused about this. Until I looked it up today, I had assumed that the shootout in Heat had been inspired by the real life shootout, but Heat was released in 1995, and the shootout took place in 1997.
Only if you’re traveling backwards in time.
There’s a saying about knife fighting: “The ‘winner’ is the one who wakes up in the hospital.”
My picks:
Das Boot; enough have said “that’s how it was” for me to believe it.
Band of Brothers; words of the original “Band.”
Heat; they actually reload during the firefight, and clear jams, too, IIRC
Open Range; other than the aforementioned nitpick/error by Costner in the opening stages of the fight
Unforgiven; for reasons mentioned upthread
Full Metal Jacket; as a former Army enlisted, my boot was like FMJ boot “light.” The rest of the movie blows.
Blackhawk Down; having read the book, they stuck pretty close to it
I’m completely ignorant of military procedure so perhaps either you or someone could answer some questions for me. Accepting the premise that you could (somehow) get to the point that I quoted…
A.) So Denzel was in the wrong, is this correct? He should have concurred under the given premise?
B.) Once launch orders are given, there is absolutely zero going back? No way, no how?
C.) What would happen if a officer whose consent is required for launch did not concur with orders? Just no launch and a guaranteed Court Marshall? Are there any cases where one may have a **valid **objection?
D.) Is there an HONEST TO GOD way to remove a commanding officer? According to the movie it sounded like Denzel had some authority to remove Hackman? Under what conditions can this be put into effect?
E.) Someone mentioned that BOTH would have been Court Marshalled. Where did Hackman go wrong?
Thank you. This and the linked thread have been fascinating.
Ah! Someone who likes Zulu! Then I have a bit to share with you. Before he became a film star, young Mr. Caine had seen some awfully nasty action in Korea. Bodies hanging on the barbed wire that no-one could go out and get. Dashed uncivilised. There was a fair amount of autobiography in his Acting in Film, which I read during the years I tread the boards.
Converserly ,as far as I am aware, Mr. Baker had never fired a pistol in his life. The next time you play the disc, watch the bit when they are both on the thatched roof of (I think) the infirmary with those wonderful Webley .455’s. True, the Webley .455 didn’t enter service until 1915 and the film is set in 1879, but why quibble? Mr. Baker is busily “throwing bullets” in the tradition of children and silent film western stars: whipping his pistol forward with every shot, as if the additional motion of the barrel would speed the bullets along.
Standing next to him is Mr. Caine: tracking moving targets with a rock-steady hand…traversing horizontally…squeezing…until at some point the pistol goes off.
You can tell which actor has used a pistol to save his life…and which one hasn’t.
Minor nitpick: it’s court martial. Plural is courts martial.
As for items A through E, I’ll let the former bubblehead (I can see his sickly green glow from here!) handle those.
It’s always nice to find another poster with refinement and taste when it comes to the cinema. 
I should, however, point out that there are actually six different marks of the . 455 Webley Revolver that were in official service with the British military at various times; the first was introduced in 1887. (For the record, Chard and Bromhead had cartridge-firing .450 Adams calibre Beaumont-Adams revolvers at Rorke’s Drift).
Full Disclosure: The linked Wiki article is (for the most part) my own work, but has been through the appropriate Peer Review process and is classified as a “Featured Article”, being appropriately cited and referenced. It’s also- IMHO- the best and most accurate overview of the various Webley service revolvers that you’re going to find anywhere on the net.
I wasn’t in the navy, but I did spend some time on Ohio class ballistic submarines. And actually went out on the real USS Alabama.
The inaccuracies in the movie “Crimson Tide” fall into many categories:
- technical (varying levels of this)
- just doesn’t happen
- overall plot
I won’t try to tackle the “overall plot” aspect, but can chime in on some of the technical aspects and “just doesn’t happen”:
- sonar - and specifically 2-d imaging sonar showing torpedos. Myself and my friend (a former sonarman) were the only ones who laughed out loud in the theatre when they showed this display. No, this does not exist.
- the sub itself - not an Ohio class missile sub. Scenes depicted the earlier Polaris missile boats (the grill mesh floors, the cramped dining area, etc.). The diving scene depicts at least 3 different types of subs.
- Missile control (Viggo’s control panel). Missile control is one of the most spacious, well lit areas on the sub. I used to hang out in the missile control room just because there was so much room. The movie made it look like Viggo was stuck in some darkroom closet (even on the older Polaris boats, it wasn’t that cramped).
- Radio repair. Having worked on sonar systems, the one thing I know about is “spares” (upon spares, upon spares) - especially for the mission critical crypto radio gear. So the whole soldering-iron-to-fix-the-board sequence was ridiculous (maybe if they’d been out for 200 days, and been through a bunch of battles, but remember they just left Bangor).
Just doesn’t happen:
The one scene that pissed me off the most was the boombox and dancing in the bunkroom scene. The crews rotate through a 6 hours on, 12 hours off schedule. So at any given time, in a bunkroom there are people sleeping. Unless it was a field day (cleaning), the bunkrooms were kept quiet and dark ALL THE TIME.
This also cracked me up: the “dive” scene. Sure there are procedures followed when the sub dives. But this does not involve huge numbers of personnel running through (and up and down ladders) the boat ! (Maybe in “Das Boot” subs, but not Ohio class nukes)
Of course the movie was depicting a battle ready situation, with nukes at stake. But I am really dubious of the fight-over-comic-book-artist scene. The one thing I picked up on during my time on subs was that the crew were of the most mellow, and “grounded” group I’d ever met. They have to be. They are SCREENED to be. All of the guys I met were really friendly, and got along really well. They gave each other shit freely, and it was all taken in stride.
Sure there were people (usually officers, and usually XO’s ironically) that rubbed some the wrong way. But that is where the rank and discipline comes in.
I love Gene Hackman’s work. But he was too much of an asshole in the movie to be a real sub captain. I only know from the few captains that I met, but they would never make wise-ass, demoralizing comments to the crew.
What did they get right ?
They do have punching bags on missile boats (some have treadmills, stairmasters, and stationary bikes as well). And some people do jog around the missile tubes (easy to smack your shins on stuff, though. I tried it a couple times).
There really is an SSBN 731 USS Alabama (unlike the USS Montana they created for “The Abyss”)
[list=A][li]An encrypted flash (highest priority) message is received by radio. A team of officers (NOT including the CO, but usually including the XO) validate the message. Their only job is to validate or invalidate the message. If the team decides the message checks out, it is relayed to the CO, who follows the orders. Period.[/li][li]Essentially correct. [/li][li]No one person can initiate a launch. Conversely, no one person (including the CO) is necessary for a launch to take place. If an officer (such as the Weapons Officer, for instance) decides that he doesn’t want to participate in the launch, he would be immediately relieved and someone else would fill in for him. He would then likely be court-martialled at a later date.[/li][li]Read the Caine Mutiny some day. A CO can in theory be relieved by the officer next in line if the CO issues an unlawful order or is incapable of carrying out his duties. This is technically a mutiny, and the relieving officer does so at his peril. All of the relieving officer’s actions will be later investigated in scrupulous detail, and the starting presumption is that such action is illegal. The relieving officer’s actions must later be found to be clearly justified, and taking such drastic action is made even more problematic by the fact that the CO may be privy to information unknown to the relieving officer. In the movie, Denzel had no reason whatsoever to relieve the CO. It paid off, but only by dumb luck.[/li][li]I don’t recall enough of the movie to answer this question. Failure to carry out his orders in a timely fashion? Allowing himself to lose command of his sub?[/list][/li]
In the context of the movie, once Denzel agreed that the first message was valid, that’s the end of the discussion. Neither his consent nor his participation is needed beyond this. If the XO bails earlier in the process, the rest of the flash message team is capable of validating the message without his participation. Remember, no one person can initiate a launch, but no one person is necessary for a launch to proceed, either.
Also, the CO had valid orders in hand. Unless these orders had a provision that included waiting for further confirmation/orders, the CO was obligated to follow the first set of orders. Denzel was completely in the wrong.
As I stated previously, it has to be this way. A strategic deterrent is only effective if it is credible. Our potential adversaries must not think that our ballistic missile submarine crews will be paralyzed with indecision should the ball ever drop. Let me assure you that our strategic deterrent force is credible, and that launches will occur if the orders go out.
Agree wholeheartedly. My only nitpick with the movie was the sailors, who had whalers among their crew, were supposed to be afraid of the singing of humpback whales? WTF?
We must be long-lost twins! I thought I was the only one who ever laughed at that.
Incidently, the use of Webley’s gets a pass in my book. They look so much like the Adams it hardly matters.
Something else that occurred to me…the fight scenes in the new “Casino Royale” were pretty well done, with some goodies thrown in for the martial arts dorks among us. In the canon, Bond is supposed to be a Judo expert, presumably a black belt, and Daniel Craig pulls off some subtle Judo stuff in the fights. In the opening sequence when he’s dragging the guy towards the sink to drown him, he has him by the collar and appears to be doing either a sliding collar choke (okuri eri jime in Japanese) or a variation of a thrusting choke (tsukkomi jime) with his collar. Later on, he kills the assassin in the stairwell with a rear naked choke (hadaka jime in Japanese, mata leão in Brazilian Portugese). Neat. 
Ones that haven’t been taken yet:
The Hunted: one of the most realistic knife fights I’ve seen on film, both Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro get cut all to hell by the time it’s done, and from start to finish the confrontation takes only a couple of minutes. The chases were mostly realistic, with no impossible leaps and little flash.
The Fugitive: The most unbelievable thing in the movie (besides the one-armed man as a murderer) was the jump from the dam, but that wasn’t impossible by any means.
Collateral: one of the reasons Vincent is so dangerous is because he just acts, without giving any warning of his intentions, and he does so decisively and brutally.
Although Tarantino’s movies are stylized in form, these three don’t feature exaggerated physics, unbelievably unrealistic situations, or most of the other weirdness you see in most action films. The results of violence are pretty close to real life. The dialog is the most incredible thing about these films, most other things are pretty believable.
Pulp Fiction: the adrenaline injection scene was not right, an EMT friend tells me, but it wasn’t entirely screwed up either.
Boulter’s Canary, actually the fight in Robin Hood was horribly, horribly bad. They looked like kids play-fighting with sticks, except they were using movie-fied greatswords instead. There’s no semblance of any swordplay, they bash the edges of the blades into each other, and they’re quite obviously unskilled fighters.
The fights in the Bourne movies are generally well done. They’re fast, no one fights clean, and the moves are pretty realistic. There’s no high kicking, minimal flash, and some very nice solid technique is featured. I have to disagree with an earlier poster that Bourne takes damage in the fights that is unsustainable. In fighting with Rome, he takes only a few decent hits, nothing incapacitating. In the second film, fighting in Berlin where he has a harder time of it, he is obviously tired, shaken, and not feeling at all well.
Some of the other situations, like the fall down the stairwell in the first film, and the overly-spectacular ending to the car chase in the second, were not realistic, obviously. But at least at the end of the second film, he appropriately looked like he was going to keel over any second.
Rob Roy wasn’t historically accurate, but it was realistic. The settings, plot, and weapons were in keeping with what was around at the time and nothing worked the way it shouldn’t. The costuming was more off than any other aspect of the film. The fighting was all pretty much spot on. The ending duel between Rob Roy and Archie, especially, has been praised by people who are into historical fencing and WMA.
The knife fighting sequences in “The Hunted” were choreographed by two Sayoc Kali instructors, very similar to the Pekiti-Tirsia Kali seen in the Bourne movies. I wanted to see it just for the Kali, but a bunch of people told me the rest of the movie was pretty bad, so I never got around to it.