US Navy submarine commander rates 14 submarine scenes in movies and TV

• We had L. David Marquet, a former submarine commander, review 14 iconic submarine scenes from movies and rate them based on their authenticity.

• He looked at the realism of nuclear crisis movies, such as "The World Is Not Enough," "K-19: The Widowmaker," and "Aquaman." He also rated the accuracy of standoff scenes in "The Hunt for Red October," "Hunter Killer," and "Crimson Tide."

• Marquet served for 28 years on submarines, including as an engineer officer aboard the USS Will Rogers, then as captain on the USS Olympia and the USS Santa Fe.

• Having retired in 2009, he is now a Wall Street Journal best-selling author of "Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders."

Below is a transcript of the video.

- [missile firing] [machine gun firing] [missile exploding] David Marquet: What? Crazy.

I'm David Marquet, former nuclear submarine commander, and I'm gonna watch some submarine clips, and we're gonna rate them for realism.

"The Hunt for Red October" (1990)

Officer: Torpedo! The Americans are shooting at us again.

Jonesy: Pitch is too high. The torpedo's Russian.

[torpedo firing]

David: Yes, you can tell what kind of torpedo it is by the sound that it makes, and all different torpedoes have slightly different sounds. So, one of the things we do is study all those different sounds to help us out.

Officer: Conn, sonar, new contact, Sierra 4-1. Alfa-class Soviet submarine.

David: Alfa-class Soviet submarine. It sends shivers up my spine! The Alfa was this crazy submarine that the Russians built back in the '70s. People were trying all kinds of different things. They had a titanium hull. They used liquefied lead to cool the reactor, if you can imagine such a thing. It was the fastest, deepest-diving submarine ever. Basically it's like a Miyata with a Corvette engine. It was a crazy submarine.

Officer: Weapon enabled on the far side of the target. It passed Red October before it armed.

David: If you turn your torpedo on too far out there because you're trying to get as close as possible and you overshoot, you missed.

Ramius: Melekhin, more speed.

Melekhin: Negative. You're already running 110%.

Ramius: Then give me 115%.

David: No, you don't do 115% on a reactor. You do 100%. Point zero. [laughs]

Officer: They didn't shoot at us. I can't attack a Soviet submarine without authorization.

David: That's right. Rules of self-defense don't let you do that. You see how Sean Connery and Scott Glenn, playing the two submarine commanders, they're, like, cool as cucumbers. These guys are within a few seconds of maybe getting blown to bits. This is exactly the way submarine commanders are.

Mancuso: You're heading straight into that torpedo.

[torpedo firing]

David: It's a highly unlikely maneuver to actually work, especially twice. And the torpedoes would never be that close together, so that, it loses some credibility. But overall, the sense of not really knowing what's going on, the sense of having to make decisions, the sense of this cat and mouse is all really good. When I joined the submarine force, I didn't come from a military family. My mom's like, "What do you do?" And I'm like, when this movie came out, I'm like, "Mom, watch this movie! This'll tell you." Eight out of 10.

Rating: 8/10

"The World Is Not Enough" (1999)

[tense music]

[man screams]

[glass breaks]

We don't use glass on a submarine like that.

[laughs] And that's why.

[submarine crashing] Considering these guys just drove into the bottom, they're in pretty good shape. Unfortunately, we kind of know what this looks like because in 2005, a US nuclear submarine did hit the bottom. This was a glancing blow. 98 of the 135 people on board suffered some sort of injury. It was very bloody on the submarine. A lot of contusions, broken bones. And this would be much worse than that, because it went straight down. They were going straight into the bottom. And so I think letting everyone sort of be OK, yeah, we saw some people bumping around, but basically everyone was OK afterwards. Of course you can't have a movie if everyone dies. That's the end of the movie. The sense of what it's like when you turn vertical, though, that's pretty good. So I'm gonna give it a six out of 10. You don't want to do this, by the way, on your submarine.

Rating: 6/10

"Aquaman" (2018)

[explosion] [man screams] Why that torpedo just fell over kind of that easy, it looked like there was a cable cut. These things are strapped down in multiple straps. It's really hard to dislodge them. And then the other thing is, what they're showing here is pretty accurate. It takes a lot for the weapon to go off, and the thing falls and bounces; the weapon's not gonna go off. You hit it with a hammer; the weapon's not gonna go off. You heat it up; the weapon's not gonna go off. These things are designed so that it takes a very specific sequence of operations to make the actual warhead go off. So, these are torpedoes, with the classic propeller on the back, and they're designed to go sink other ships or submarines. Submarines also can carry missiles that can attack land targets and missiles that can attack other ships, and also mines that would lie in wait for the bad guy. It only takes one of these modern torpedoes to sink all but the very largest warships. It's a space that every crew member on the submarine would have access to and would be knowledgeable about. The reason is because if there's some sort of a casualty, we need to muster the entire crew to go find it. The philosophy on a submarine is, "One crew, one fight." So with very few exceptions, the entire crew has access to the entire ship. I'm gonna give it a seven out of 10.

Rating: 7/10

"The Simpsons" (1998)

[menacing music]

[submarine explodes]

Barney: Mayday! Mayday! The engine room has sprung a leak!

David: Now, this scene from "The Simpsons" sends shivers up my spine, because this is the worst fear of all submariners, flooding. At deep depth, the water comes in very, very quickly, and you don't need to flood the entire submarine. Here's what happens. Let's say there's water in the front part of the submarine. That part of the submarine starts to get heavier, and then the submarine starts to tip down like this, which means that the water in the submarine rushes more towards the front, and it makes it even heavier and tips down even more. And so what happens is now the sub, you end up like this. And when you're like this, your ballast tanks don't work anymore. You can't use the air to blow the water out, because the air will just go out the side. This is how you die in a submarine. And if you saw the movie "Titanic," that's how that ship sank. And you remember at the end of the movie as the ship was sinking, the Titanic was rising up, and that's because the water was cascading from compartment to compartment to compartment. It's called the free-surface effect, and that's how you die on a submarine. It's not pretty. Now, if you're taking on water like these guys are, the first thing you're going to want to do is come as shallow as possible. That does two things for you. No. 1, the pumps that are pumping off the water have less pressure to pump against, so you're pumping off faster and the water coming in has less pressure behind it. Easiest way to stop flooding on a submarine, because most of the water inside a submarine is coming in through pipes, is we have these valves that we can shut. Isolate the system. Now, here, it looks like it's next to a tank or maybe even the hull. In that case, it's a very, very difficult problem, because when you get a leak, that water is spraying in so hard. It's harder than any water cannon you have ever seen. And they show it here; it's trickling in like a limp garden hose! There's no way! So, you're pushing against the pressure to put an earring pin in there? No. The most realistic thing in this whole scene is the guy underwater drinking beer. So I gotta give them, like, at least a three, though, for trying. [laughs]

Rating: 3/10

"Black Sea" (2014)

Morozov: From here to here. Robinson: Which means we are on one of these two ridges, or we'd be crushed.

David: Yeah, now, these charts are very accurate. You can see they have contour lines, and for a body of water like the Black Sea, which humans have operated in for a long time, it's probably very well mapped. That's probably accurate.

Robinson: No, the Black Sea is anoxic at depth. No oxygen.

David: Yeah, the Black Sea is a very special body of water. It's basically like a bathtub, and it has very little interaction, and you have rivers flowing into it, and then that flows out to the Mediterranean. So, deep, there's a layer where the deeper water is anoxic. There's very, very little oxygen. And as a result, there's little decay. Now, I'm not sure it's perfectly preserved, but it's just like finding human remains in bogs. They're very well preserved. Whether they can use the driveshaft or not, I don't know. But it's still overall nine out of 10 for realism. That's true.

Rating: 9/10

"Crimson Tide" (1995)

Ramsey: We have rules that are not open to interpretation, personal intuition, gut feelings, hairs on the back of your neck.

Hunter: Captain.

Ramsey: We're all very well aware of what our orders are and what those orders mean.

David: This is exactly right. You wanna side with Denzel, but what Gene Hackman is saying right here is exactly right. These guys are trained on this 100 times, including the exact kinds of errors that they're seeing right now. But then he takes it too far.

Ramsey: Cob, arrest this man and get him out of here!

Hunter: Capt. Ramsey, under operating procedures governing the release of nuclear weapons, we cannot launch our missiles unless both you and I agree.

David: That's right. So, Denzel doesn't need to get in a big argument, he just needs to say, "I'm not gonna announce that." The rest of the crew knows. The procedure is if they don't hear both voices, those missiles aren't gonna fly. Gene Hackman doesn't have the right to remove him from his position because he doesn't agree with him. It's set up so that two people independently have to make the decision to launch nuclear weapons. It's such a huge deal.

Ramsey: I order you to place the XO under arrest under charges of mutiny!

David: Now, this is all just a fantasy that some Hollywood people dreamed up. First of all, it's not mutiny, because Denzel is not collaborating with anybody. It's just, he's by himself. Mutiny would mean he has a whole bunch of, or at least one other person with him. Denzel can't relieve the captain just because he doesn't agree with the captain's decision. Commanding officers can get relieved for, for example, a medical reason, he's incapacitated. Having a disagreement about something is not a legitimate reason for relieving your commanding officer. No one would follow that order. I'm gonna give it, like, a four out of 10.

Rating: 4/10

"Das Boot" (1981)

[alarm ringing]

So, that's kind of what it would look like. Now, the reason they have to practice this is because a World War II submarine spends a lot of time on the surface. It's really more of a submersible, because they have diesel engines and they need oxygen. Nuclear submarines, we spend almost all of our time underwater. So, let's say you're on the surface, steaming along, and all of a sudden someone sees an airplane coming toward you. You gotta get underwater very, very, very quickly. So what's happening is the people on the bridge are coming down from the bridge. Now, the hatch is open, but at the same time we're opening the vents and flooding the submarine and tipping it deep. You gotta get the hatch shut before the water level comes up to that level, or all of a sudden you're gonna start taking flooding. So it's a very highly choreographed and synchronized event. This is a 10 out of 10. This is exactly what it would have been like.

Rating: 10/10

"Act of Valor" (2012)

Man: Chief of the watch, submerge the ship to 160 feet.

David: So, you see here, the submarine spends as little time on the surface as possible. Submariners are allergic to sunlight. The whole point of being a submarine is to stay underwater. So they pop up at the very last minute, and as soon as they get the SEAL team on board, which they do very rapidly, shut the hatch and submerge the ship again. Here's the thing in war. If you can be seen, you can be targeted. If you can be targeted, you can be shot. If you can be shot, you can be killed. So the best way to break that chain of events is at the very beginning. Overall, I'm gonna rate this a seven out of 10 for realism.

Rating: 7/10

"K-19: The Widowmaker" (2002)

Vostrikov: The reactor repair has failed. At any moment we could have an explosion, which could set off the warheads.

David: No. Reactors don't explode. This unfortunately is perpetuating a myth that we have to fight in nuclear power, which is that reactors are somehow like nuclear weapons and that a reactor's gonna explode like nuclear weapons can. So, first of all, the reactor's not gonna explode. Secondly, I'd say within their power, it might melt down, but it's not gonna explode. If it exploded, the chance of it igniting, detonating secondary weapons, zero. 'Cause the other weapons are designed not to go off just because there's another explosion nearby.

Vostrikov: This would destroy the American ship only a few kilometers from the NATO base.

David: It wouldn't set off the warheads, 'cause the warheads are designed not to detonate unless their detonation sequence goes through. You can't, if you blow up a warhead, it doesn't also blow up. The chance that they'd be so close that if their warheads went off, it would destroy this other ship or the NATO base, again, highly, highly, highly improbable.

Vostrikov: We could dive and attempt to repair the reactor.

David: No. What does diving have to do with repairing the reactor? You just repair the reactor wherever you are. So, I mean, they don't really have much of a choice here. Either they don't try and fix the reactor and risk an explosion, or they try and fix the reactor. So it's not like there's a whole debate here, but I'm gonna rate this a zero out of 10, because not only is it totally unrealistic, but it perpetuates some of the unhelpful myths about nuclear power.

Rating: 0/10

"U-571" (2000)

Klough: This is the Navy, where a commanding officer's a mighty and terrible thing. Don't you dare say what you said to the boys back there again, "I don't know."

David: Yeah, this is a command philosophy thing. Now, I'll tell you, I like to say, "I don't know," because what it does is it invites thinking from the crew. When Capt. Sullenberger landed his airplane, the Airbus on the Hudson River, one of the last things that he said to the copilot was, "Hey, you got any ideas?" What you want is everyone on board and thinking. Now, maybe in an extreme crisis you don't wanna act like you don't really know what's going on, but 99.999% of the time, saying, "I don't know," saying, "What do you think?" That's really a good thing.

Klough: You're the skipper now. And the skipper always knows what to do, whether he does or not.

David: The official title for the captain of a submarine is commanding officer or CO or sometimes captain. That's a very common thing. But here, Harvey Keitel refers to Matthew McConaughey as "skipper." That comes from an old German Dutch word that's based on ships: schip, schipper. Another term for the captain is little less fun. It's called the "old man." And they might refer to the captain as the old man 'cause typically the captain was the oldest person on the ship. Now, you'll notice they're wearing different uniforms. And the idea, it comes from back in World War II, the submarines, because they're so tight and so claustrophobic, they were a little less formal than the surface ships. And the men tended to take some liberties with their uniforms. This is pushing it a little bit. On modern submarines, what you're gonna find is everyone is looking very professional. We have common uniforms, and they're designed to protect us from fires and things like that. So we take these uniforms very seriously, because they could end up saving our lives. I'm gonna give it an eight out of 10.

Rating: 8/10

"Hunter Killer" (2018)

Man: Captain, we're prepared to counter launch.

David: Yeah, so this is the first question. "We're prepared to counter launch." Counter launch what? Submarines don't have weapons to shoot down other missiles. They have weapons to shoot down ships and other submarines.

[missile firing]

[guns firing]

[missile exploding]

What? Yeah, that's an incredible weapon, but not that incredible. Look, these missiles are the size of small school buses. They're flying at 1,000 miles an hour, they're this far away, coming this way at the submarine, you put 100 bullets in that thing in two seconds, it's still gonna go right through the submarine. Crazy. Multiple issues with tactics. The physics of the thing don't really work. I don't think any submarine commander would act that way. I love the movie, but it's not realistic. I'm gonna give it a three out of 10.

Rating: 3/10

"The Wolf's Call" (2019)

[singing and drumming]

Yeah, I don't think so. Here's the problem. Sound does not transmit well between a big interface, like the water to the air. So, you can stick your head underwater and you can hear, say you could hear whales and stuff, then you put your head in the air; you don't hear them anymore. And the reverse is true. Sound that's in the air doesn't transmit into the water. If he were drumming on the side of the ship, the side of that little rowboat, and that rowboat was transmitting the noise into the water, then, yeah, I could hear that, but it wouldn't have the fidelity that these guys are listening to. Good movie, but this scene, not so realistic. Five out of 10 for this particular scene.

Rating: 5/10

"The Enemy Below" (1957)

Murrell: Mr. Ware, set depth charges to 100.

Mr. Ware: Arr!

[death charges firing]

David: Yeah, so in World War II, none of these weapons were guided. You had to drive directly over the enemy submarine and launch your depth charges, hopefully setting them to the right depth.

[sonar beeping]

Von Stolberg: He's turning.

David: So, he's listening to the sonar, and when you have two propellers, those destroyers have two propellers, and so when a ship starts to turn, what happens is the water pressure is different and so the two propellers get a little out of sync. So instead of going, [mimics propeller noise] it's like, [mimics out-of-sync propeller noise] and you can hear that. And that's what the submarine captain there is listening to. So, the destroyer went over, and now it wants to come back, but it has to turn, and at that point, it's very broad. That's the point of maximum vulnerability. I'm gonna give this an eight out of 10 for what World War II submarine-vs-destroyer combat looked like.

Rating: 8/10

There's no way! So, you're pushing against the pressure to put an earring pin in there? No. The most realistic thing in this whole scene is the guy underwater drinking beer.