Crimson Tide 1995 is a stupidly smart movie

  Blender Dumbass
September 23, 2025

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Before Jerry Bruckheimer was obsessed with telling all his directors to be like Michael Bay and before Don Simpson had passed away. The duo of Simpson and Bruckheimer were obsessed with Tony Scott, the director of such classics as Top Gun, Days of Thunder and Enemy of the State ( which coincidentally were all produced by Jerry and Don, apart from the last film, which was produced after Don's passing ). But Tony Scott didn't only work with the duo. For example in 1993 he made a film not produced by Jerry and Don called True Romance from a screenplay of Quentin Tarantino. Which makes Crimson Tide the second collaboration of the two.

I don't know if that was Michael Bay trying to imitate Tarantino on set of Bad Boys, or the previous collaboration of Tony and Quentin, or both, but somehow Simpson and Bruckheimer ended up hiring QT for dialogue touch-ups in this movie and later in The Rock. Crimson Tide was released only a month after Bad Boys and was probably a larger production. So I highly doubt Michael Bay's attempt at Tarantinoness was a factor here. It is more likely that Scott just really liked Quentin's writing and insisted on bringing him over to help a bit with the script. And then because Don and Jerry knew Quentin from this movie, Michael Bay wanted the same thing for The Rock, which to me sounds a bit more plausible.

Speaking of dialogue. This movie is rock solid when it comes to people arguing with each other. The whole premise of the film hangs on the ability of the writers to write a compelling argument between two commanders. Writers Michael Schiffer and Quentin Tarantino knocked that out of the park. And Tony Scott was smart enough to actually let the scene play out in conversation, building tension from the conversation and about the conversation. Sounds like the movie has something to do with Francis Ford Coppola's film The Conversation.

Yes it does. Gene Hackman, who played the main character in The Conversation is the one doing the conversation with Denzel Washington's character in this movie. And speaking of Coppola... Maybe Jerry and Don and later just Jerry were silently obsessed with the Coppola family. They used Nicolas Cage ( who is a part of the Coppola family ) a lot and used actors like Hackman and Robert Duvall who are famous for working with Francis.

Another theory of mine, is that the duo were fan boys of James Cameron. Cameron never worked with them. And probably never wanted to work with them. But they probably knew that he was a cool fucking director. So if they couldn't work with him, they could at least imitate him a bit. You can kind of see a similarity of a pre-Titanic action film director Cameron to the films of Don and Jerry. But more than that you can see how much Don and Jerry are sleazy little bastards trying to be good to James Cameron by making homages to his least successful film The Abyss.

It is known that The Abyss was a hard motherfucking production that made everybody crazy and that forced Ed Harris to swear that he will never work with James Cameron again. And yet despite all the struggle on set ( if you can call it "set" ) the movie was the worst performing movie James Cameron ever did. Which means, saying good things about this movie ( or having homages to this movie ) is a sort of calculated flattery to James Cameron.

The whole premise of Crimson Tide is just the first scene of The Abyss ( the submarine scene ) but stretched over 2 hours and with a happy ending. And then a year later with The Rock Michael Bay took Cameron actors like Ed Harris and Michael Biehn from the same The Abyss. Probably another attempt at flattery. You can even argue that Pearl Harbor is Jerry Bruckheimer's slightly miscalculated act of Cameron fan-boyism.

The funny thing is though, Cameron sort of payed attention. At about the time Cameron was starting production on Titanic, Crimson Tide and later The Rock ( which both were calculated attempts at getting James Cameron's attention ) came out. And both films had Danny Nucci ( a Jewish / Italian actor ) in small roles. James Cameron ended up snatching this kid and casting him as the side kick of Leonardo DiCaprio's character named Fabrizio. Who gets way more screen time in Titanic than in both Don and Jerry films.

Compared to Michael Bay movies or the Bay era Bruckheimer movies, Crimson Tide is slow and methodical. It has its action moments. But the majority of the film is about those two characters arguing about ethics and philosophy. And their ultimate disagreement about a Nuclear missile launch. Which makes the movie surprisingly smart. Something that I didn't expect to see. I was all in, thinking Don and Jerry were going to ask Tony to Bayhem! the fuck out of that submarine, with characters shouting a record breaking amount of F-bombs because Tarantino is involved. What I got instead is a good fucking drama. Yes it all happens in a very tense situation on a nuclear submarine. And yes it is about the end of the world kind of stakes. Very blockbuster-esque topics indeed. Still through all that, the drama is fucking sharp and Scott demonstrates and amazing ability to direct said drama. And to build the tension required for this drama to work.

I do feel a bit strange about the few deaths on the submarine. And the matter of fact nature of them. I think somebody like Michael Bay would have at least cared to remind us that those deaths happened in the end of the film, in respect to the fictional characters ( and their real life counterparts ). On the other hand, though, Bay would probably not do the conversation scenes as well as Scott did them, because Bay would have needed to inject them with way too much intensity, that is completely unnecessary in scenes like these. The closest Bay ever got to something like this when it comes to people having an argument is probably 13 Hours and it was because the movie was about a real life situation where Bay respects the people involved. In his other films he just wants the action to start already and the dialogue is either there to set up the action, or is there as a one-liner to spice the action up.

I think a good analogy of the type of movie ( conversation-wise ) Crimson Tide is, would be Steven Spielberg's 2015 film Bridge of Spies written by the Coen Brothers. Where the main character is this lawyer guy who is just so motherfucking good at arguing with people, the conversations are the fun part. Denzel Washington's character here is this sort of character. And Gene Hackman, while not being as good of an arguer, he is damn close and is tough enough of a military man, that both of them sound right and both of them sound wrong all a the same time. Making the movie very fucking interesting. Add to that a bit of a Tarantino flare and you get yourself a banger of a film.

Happy Hacking!!!

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