I'm very late to see this venerable Sean Connery vehicle. He plays the smartest sub commander in the Russian fleet, initially in Russian but soon enough almost entirely in English for the convenience of the target audience. (Connery starts taciturn / laconic and I feel could've stayed that way, quite successfully; and are we to believe that Cold War Lithuanians spoke English with a Scots accent?) The plot begins after about 38 minutes of setup, when it is suggested that this is Dr Strangelove on submarines (without the humour). — but no! it is something else again. And that something is not Das Boot. It doesn't entirely hold together, and the denouement is hokum, but it has its moments. The cinematography is generally quite good.
The cast is vast, perhaps too vast. Alec Baldwin plays a Harrison Ford CIA role and is almost unrecognisably thin and dark haired. I've seen James Earl Jones don exactly this brass before, in Gardens of Stone. Sam Neil is Connery's second banana with an accent that wanders all over the globe. Stellan Skarsgård smokes moodily and acts dumb. In this reality Peter Firth's cadre (Ivan) Putin "could've caused complications!" — but Connery is on the job and he's rubbed out early. And so on.
We're shown many reasons why the world will never be at peace for long. The Russians have a penchant for gigantism (they built the biggest nukes and here the biggest sub) and use metric and left-and-right. There are tea and cigarettes on their vessels. The Americans do not like being smaller and use imperial, port-and-starboard. It seems that smaller subs and drones are the future, not these large ones, and the Alec Baldwins will be staying far from the battlefield.
Got Oscared for effects. Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Vincent Canby: only the audience knows for sure (how things are going to go).