Essay: 5 Submarine Movies, From Best To Best

Dive!

Mar 13, 2025

5. Ice Station Zebra (1968)
Rock Hudson plays the decent, square-jawed captain of a nuclear sub ferrying a couple of shady spies on a mission to rescue an Arctic expedition before the Soviets can get there. The spies are played by a sneeringly good Patrick McGoohan and Ernest Borgnine, whose Russian accent is enthusiastic but inconsistent. Jim Brown also shows up as a no-nonsense Marine. This is a peak Cold War thriller. Hudson is cool, calm, and competent. The submarine is cool, too. It is a spaceship of sorts, full of buttons and screens. The Soviets, when we meet them, are also cool but evil. The submarine sequences are surprisingly well done — just solid practical effects work. Michel Legrand's score is swashbuckling. Ice Station Zebra is also notable for its complete and total lack of women. It’s just dudes in a tube doing dangerous stuff.

4. Crimson Tide (1995)
Director Tony Scott is missed. His best movies are slick, muscular action dramas about men under pressure, so it makes sense that a movie about a nuclear submarine would be one of his best. In Crimson Tide, a nail-biting late Cold War thriller, a decorated naval captain and his charismatic young executive officer come to blows over orders. The stars are a pair of Scott favorites: human steam valve Gene Hackman is the captain willing to start World War III, and Denzel Washington is his second in command, a jaw-clenching do-gooder willing to stage a mutiny. Scott had a knack for finding macho beauty in machines of war, and Crimson Tide is a slick advertisement for sealing yourself into a heavily armed cigar-shaped death trap for Uncle Sam.

3. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1954)
I can’t imagine a better adaptation of Jules Verne’s classic sci-fi novel than this family-friendly classic starring Kirk Douglas, Paul Lukas and Peter Lorre as victims of a sea monster attack who are then rescued by James Mason, as the mysterious Nemo, captain of the famous submarine Nautilus. He’s a reclusive genius and explorer obsessed with vengeance against the civilized world. He’s uptight, to say the least. This old-timey action-adventure still looks terrific, even the climactic kid-friendly battle with a giant squid. Walt Disney spared no expense on the sets, and the special effects. Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under The Sea is a movie about madness and technology, but it’s mainly about a badass submarine with lots of cool gadgets—a spiny, high-speed battering ram with bubble windows and a pipe organ stuffed in the bow. Mason stands out in this supervillain story, but dimpled-chinned Douglas, wisecrack harpooner, more than holds his own.

2. The Abyss (1989)
This is James Cameron’s masterpiece. The Abyss is a little bit of Alien and Close Encounters Of Third Kind set under — way under — the sea. It is a thriller, a romance, and a submarine movie. A dear friend disagreed with my classifying The Abyss as a "submarine movie," but he is wrong, bless his heart. The Abyss fits all the criteria for a submarine movie: the drama is claustrophobic and sweaty. It takes place at the bottom of the ocean in a submerged facility with multiple mini-subs. One of the characters even suffers from the bends, a well-known occupational hazard of submariners. What else do you need? Most of The Abyss was shot in gigantic silos filled with water, Cameron soaked his cast for months. The massive sets aside, it also featured cutting-edge CGI effects at the time, an epic production. But the movie’s propulsion system is the chemistry between leads Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, a pair of engineers and exes who must work to discover why a nuclear submarine went down. Michael Biehn is fantastic as a Navy SEAL leading this charge into the deep. There are E.T./mermaids at the bottom of the ocean, but Harris and Mastrantonio give the movie its buoyancy.

1. ‘Das Boot’ (1981)
Wolfgang Peterson passed away in 2022, leaving behind a legacy of intelligent, over-the-top Hollywood blockbusters for adults who love popcorn, like Air Force One, In The Line Of Fire, and 2004’s sprawling sword-and-sandal saga Troy (he was also responsible for the inventive kid's fantasy flick The Neverending Story.) But his 1981 German-language submarine movie Das Boot made him an international star, and it’s the work he’ll be remembered for the most. And rightly so. It is arguably, the greatest movie ever made about naval warfare and a World War II classic, a rare one from the point of view of the doomed Nazis. Jürgen Prochnow is the hard-bitten captain, unsure if the sacrifices he and his men make are worth it. He is a conflicted cog in a war machine run by evil men who will destroy their country. The scenes inside the German U-boats are claustrophobic and electric, and sometimes the movie steers into the horror genre. I suppose all war movies are horror, though. Peterson is the rare foreign director to hit it big in Hollywood, and he deserved that success; his big-budget movies are subversive and wild at the same time. But Das Boot is special. War is hell, and hell is the cold, black depths of the ocean.