The Hunt for Red October (alternate on-screen Russian title: красный октябрь) is a 1990 American submarine spy thriller film directed by John McTiernan, produced by Mace Neufeld, and starring Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones, and Sam Neill.

A CIA analyst correctly deduces his motive and must prove his theory before a violent confrontation between the Soviet Red Fleet and the United States Navy spirals out of control.

At sea, Ramius secretly kills political officer Ivan Putin and relays false orders to his crew that they are to conduct missile drills off America's east coast.

American Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Dallas, which had been shadowing Red October, loses contact once the sub's caterpillar drive is engaged.

Upon learning that the bulk of the Soviet Navy has been deployed to the Atlantic to find and sink the sub, the military staff conclude that Ramius plans a renegade nuclear strike.

Countering this view, Ryan hypothesizes that Ramius, a native-born Lithuanian widower with few remaining personal ties to the Soviet Union, actually plans to defect with the sub, to the United States.

National Security Advisor Jeffrey Pelt gives Ryan three days to confirm his theory before the U.S. Navy will be ordered to find and sink Red October.

Due to an unknown saboteur's actions, Red October's caterpillar drive malfunctions during risky maneuvers through a narrow undersea canyon.

Aboard Dallas, Petty Officer Ronald "Jonesy" Jones, a sonar technician, discovers a way to detect Red October using his underwater acoustics software, and the boat plots an intercept course.

After a hazardous mid-ocean transfer, Ryan is able to board Dallas, where he attempts to persuade its captain, Commander Bart Mancuso, to contact Ramius and determine his real intentions.

Ryan, Mancuso, and Jonesy board Red October via a rescue submarine, at which point Ramius turns over his sub to the Americans and requests asylum for himself and his officers.

Meanwhile, Konovalov fires upon Red October with a torpedo, which Dallas is able to divert toward herself and evade by launching countermeasures and conducting an emergency blow to the surface.

Ramius admits that he defected because he believed Red October was intended for a preemptive nuclear first strike against the United States and was unwilling to support such an action.

[6] The Navy gave the filmmakers access to several Los Angeles-class submarines, allowing them to photograph unclassified sections of both Chicago and Portsmouth to use in set and prop design.

[5] The filmmakers' first choice to portray Jack Ryan was Kevin Costner, who turned down the film in order to star in and direct Dances with Wolves.

Klaus Maria Brandauer was cast as Soviet sub commander Marko Ramius but quit two weeks into filming due to a prior commitment.

Two 50-square-foot (4.6 m2)[verification needed] platforms housing mock-ups of Red October and Dallas were built, standing on hydraulic gimbals that simulated the sub's movements.

[14] Made before the extensive use of CGI became the norm in filmmaking, the film's opening sequence featured a long pull-out reveal of the immense titular Typhoon-class sub.

[15] By March 1990, just before the film's theatrical release, the Soviet Parliament removed the Communist Party from government, effectively ending the Cold War.

To compensate for the change in the Soviet Union's political climate, an on-screen crawl appears at the beginning of the film stating that it takes place in 1984 during the Cold War.

[16][17] In one scene, where USS Dallas is chasing Red October through the submarine canyon, the crew can be heard calling out that they have various "milligal anomalies".

Thought to be a billion dollar black project, the development of a full-tensor gravity gradiometer by Bell Aerospace was a classified technology at the time.

[20] The album is missing some of the musical moments present in the film, including the scene where the crew of Red October sings the Soviet national hymn.

The site's consensus states: "Perfectly cast and packed with suspense, The Hunt for Red October is an old-fashioned submarine thriller with plenty of firepower to spare.

Nick Schager, for Slant magazine's review, noted, "The Hunt for Red October is a thrilling edge-of-your-seat trifle that has admirably withstood the test of time".

[30] Vincent Canby, writing for The New York Times, opined that "the characters, like the lethal hardware, are simply functions of the plot, which in this case seems to be a lot more complex than it really is".

[32] The film is a somewhat faithful adaptation of Clancy's novel, though there are many deviations, including: Red October traveling up the Penobscot River in Maine to dry dock.

The V. K. Konovalov being serendipitously destroyed by its own torpedo as opposed to being rammed by Red October, with the planned explosion of USS Ethan Allen (SSBN-608) as a subterfuge.