'Crimson Tide,' the 1990s’ other great submarine thriller, turns 30

Tony Scott directed Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman in a military thriller about a nuclear near-miss.

The Hunt for Red October, released in 1990, was a movie about the Cold War, which happened to end while the movie was in production.

Another submarine movie, Crimson Tide, arrived five years later, and while set in a post-Cold War world, it was based on circumstances that allowed the Cold War to temporariliy restart- this time, through a plot in which a rogue separatist Russian general has captured a nuclear missile installation and is threatening to use it to start World War III. If only he were secretly trying to defect…

Other aspects of Crimson Tide set it firmly in its era. Three years after A Few Good Men, it was a military-set duel between the tough officer and the less combat-hardened intellectual type. And like almost every action movie released between 1993 and 1997, it ends with a Mexican standoff, or rather, more than one of them. The era’s biggest fan of Mexican standoffs, Quentin Tarantino, allegedly did an uncredited rewrite to add some pop culture references.

The film, from the Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer production company and directed by Tony Scott, has a great deal going for it: A strong script by Michael Schiffer, a first-rate score by Hans Zimmer, a premise in which the stakes couldn't be higher, and very good lead performances by two of the greatest actors of any of our lifetimes, Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington.

In Scott’s filmography, it arrived after True Romance, and before The Fan.