A Dramatic Tour of A Russki Diesel Boat
I normally don’t endorse things. However I watched a halfway decent film online the other day. Entitled ‘Phantom‘ it is a recent film starring David Duchovny (Moulder from the X-Files) and Ed “Enemy at the Gates” Harris. Set on a Soviet diesel ballistic missile submarine it is a different take on the K-129 incident with some very Americanized cliché Red October elements.
The acting is OK, the plot and script is kinda sketchy, but the real star is the sub!
Within about the first ten minutes you can tell that the interior shots of the submarine looked too good, too 1960s clunky Russian
with too much of worn-in quality to the boat to be faked. I thought at first that it was filmed based on the myriad of old US submarines around with a few Russian signs hung up, but the thing is, everything from the placards on the torpedo tubes to the
switches on the battle lanterns was stone cold CCCP.
So I did some digging..
It turns out about 80 percent of the movie was shot aboard the former Soviet B-39 attack submarine owned by the Maritime Museum of San Diego. The 1967-built Foxtrot-class (Project 641) submarine has been moored in the bay along Harbor Drive since 2004. The crew spent three weeks aboard the sub, filming with advanced lightweight (4-pound) cameras, making it perhaps the first theatrical submarine film shot mostly on a submarine, rather than on a sound stage made to *look* like a submarine. Before her role as a movie stage, she served on active duty in the Soviet Navy for nearly thirty years. At 294-feet, she is about the size of an US Navy WWII fleet sub, but with a 20,000 nm range.
Even if you aren’t a fan of slightly far-fetched Red October rehash, it’s a great 90-minute working tour of a Soviet Foxtrot diesel
boat. And if you have Netflix, its streaming for free. If you are a torrent person, then you have your own ways.