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.

Submarine warfare movies