HALO operations are intended to limit the visibility of the operator by jumping at altitudes in excess of 30,000 feet (more than twice a normal skydiving altitude) and waiting until the last possible moment to open the parachute. The SEALs enter into Russia on foot, after conducting what’s commonly referred to as a HALO drop (High Altitude Low Opening) near the border. military personnel operating in the Pentagon and on a four-man team of Navy SEALs sent into Russia to conduct reconnaissance. While much of Hunter Killer takes place aboard the USS Arkansas, the film also focuses heavily on U.S. You may be alone, but fear is a part of the job. The sense of foreboding of hunting, or being hunted, in a metal can deep beneath the ocean’s surface.Īs Wallace put it, the old axiom “alone and unafraid” isn’t appropriate for submarine commanders.
VIRGINIA CLASS SUBMARINE CONTROL ROOM MOVIE
But there’s one thing both author and director agreed on that the movie really did get right-terror.
The speed and distances shown on screen, according to the film’s director, were all for the sake of clean, coherent storytelling. “We deal in, in some cases, hours, but certainly multi-digit minutes.” “The biggest differences between what they showed on the big screen and reality were the distances involved, where you saw everything in terms of a few hundred feet maybe, and where you’re seeing everything in very fast ‘real time,’” former sub commander and the book’s co-author George Wallace explained. Sometimes, elements had to be changed for the sake of operational security, but other changes helped tell a more compelling story. A Dash of Movie Magicīut not everything depicted aboard the USS Arkansas is true to life. The crew aboard the USS Arkansas (Butler’s sub in the movie) aren’t leaning and shaking like Captain Kirk on Star Trek -they’re really holding on. The result is a sort of nuanced realism on the big screen you have trouble putting your finger on. Navy, Marsh and his team set about building replicas of the interior quarters of a Virginia-class submarine that they proceeded to mount on a massive, hydraulically powered platform they then programmed to approximate the way a real sub would shift and turn. It was very dramatic, and I thought, ‘Man, I’d really like to do this for real.’”Īrmed with blueprints provided by the U.S.
“They did this thing where they angled the submarine down to 30 degrees, and literally, everyone had to lean back and hold on or they’d fall over. “I asked them to do all the maneuvers from the film, as though they were being chased by a torpedo or had to make sudden evasive maneuvers,” Marsh told Popular Mechanics. In fact, it was Marsh’s time aboard the USS Houston that led him to make a dramatic (and expensive) decision regarding the film’s production: He built an entire submarine set atop a massive gimbal that would allow actors to move around in much the same way a real submarine's crew would while maneuvering in a combat environment. "I asked them to do all the maneuvers from the film, as though they were being chased by a torpedo." Wallace’s experiences in the control room of real nuclear submarines directly informed the ways the story clings to reality, though, as Wallace will readily admit, not all of his real experiences translate well into film. The close relationship Hunter Killer tries to maintain with the real world is by design: The story itself is based on the novel Firing Point, which was co-authored by warfare historian Don Keith and former U.S. And while the sweeping brushstrokes of Hunter Killer, which hit theaters October 26, are indeed a fantasy, its depiction of submarine warfare is startlingly realistic.įrom the accurate sets, to illustrating the chain of command, to conveying the very physics of submarine warfare, Hunter Killer checks all the boxes-and this is how they did it. Four Navy SEALs covertly entering Russia, rescuing its Vladimir Putin-like president from a well-orchestrated coup, and then escaping in a submerged submarine definitely sounds like fiction.
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