[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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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.

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,