The Sum of All Fears (2002)

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cool. Welcome to season 2, episode 3 of Clear and present Dudes, the podcast that demands to be described as robust and healthy. I am Mike Zumbaugh and I'm joined by Rory O'Toole. Hello and Sonia Bjorkson. Hello. And this week, we are finally returning to the Well of Jack Ryan and discussing of The Sum of All Fears. Before we do that, as always, I'm going to say real podcasts have a have a separate section for this that they prerecord, but I we're not that guy. So please comment on Spotify, like subscribe, come on the YouTube, subscribe to the sub stack.

I like a review and on Apple. Any of all of these would be appreciated. Before we continue though, some shout outs obviously give thanks to Captain Meridian, Eric Fisher, and of course Jim Murray for doing just those things. And that's probably been quite helpful to the algorithm, so thank you very much. Cool. So this week we are talking about The Sum of All Fears, a 2002 American spy thriller film directed by Phil Alden Robinson, based on Tom Clancy's 1991 novel of the same name. The film which is set in the Jack Ryan film series is weirdly a reboot taking place in 2002.

So Jack Ryan is portrayed as a younger character and is portrayed by Ben Affleck in comparison with the previous films. The Hunter Rachel, which we already covered starring Alec Baldwin and then the shining golden example in the middle which we haven't touched yet out of of Fear and Trepidation, The Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger starring Armand Harrison Ford. In this film, a Austrian neo Nazi played by Alan Bates attempts to trigger a nuclear war between the United States and Russia by setting off a nuclear device in Baltimore simultaneously with a rogue Russian officer launching an attack on an American aircraft carrier.

It's designed to establish a European fascist super state. A weird movie. A lot of our mouthful there impressions guys. What do you think Yeah it's a weird movie and that's need to say as well. Obviously this is a spoiler cast the we like the cut out of the bag consistently with these films. If if you've not seen the film, we'll still be here in two hours go find it. It's on some of the streamers it's on it's on YouTube as well or rent. I think it might be on Netflix too and it's probably available for like a pound on DVD local cex.

So yeah, what a film. At the time of recording it has just appeared on UK and Netflix, but I bought it about a year ago. So right to see pop up this week. What a film. What a really interesting film comes at a very interesting time in American history when like you look at the global War on Terror that was beginning to ramp up on the film was was released. The incidents that happened while while the film was in production. Spoiler alert 911 the tone of the film. It's very much like it's a film about cooler heads prevailing.

And there's been a dearth of films about cooler American and Russian heads prevailing since then. Because everything very quickly sharpened up to let's go and kick some doors in and bust some heads and not listen that nerds like, like this Jack Ryan guy. And don't let, don't let him get on. Get an get on and start sending text messages to people like that. You know, got to take, got to take his PDA away from him. You know, it's a great film. Loved it. Yeah. Sonia, what were your thoughts? My biggest two thoughts were, oh, so that's where that blast sequence that I keep seeing on YouTube Shorts comes from and man, I can't believe they really went there for a Jack Ryan movie because how often do you casually have someone just nuking a place and a movie that isn't like the Terminator series that's.

Literally what I was going to say is like the Terminator is the one where you see a nuke on mainland American soil isn't it? It's like it's like the only time you see a nuke in a film go off without an actual Armageddon scenario where the entire world just ends, which is odd to see. It's a weird movie. I think every decade, like 80s into 90s, nineties into NE, NE into 10s, there's like a couple of years where the culture kind of goes through a bit of a change and it catches up. And I think this is 2002 that it came out.

This is still in my mind kind of like the death throes of like a 90s movie. This doesn't feel like a a NE film. This feels like a a 90s movie through and through. Partly because the book it's based upon is from the 90s, early 90s, but just the vibe of it as well, just, you know, very big over the top villains. You know, it doesn't feel like. So I say that the contest I'm trying to give to it is Ben Affleck's very good friend Matt Damon was like blow this potential franchise because this is a reboot.

It's they're trying to start a franchise. We're blown out the water with Jason Bourne, which again, it's like based on all the novels, but it was just so fresh and the way it was presented and so new shaky Cam, you know, improvised Kraft Megar, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So that's my overriding opinion of those films. I was watching it going this is a 90s movie that came out in the in the 90s. Oh yes, and of course I have to say this, but could they maybe find actual Germans to do Germans like?

That that bit. You're complaining that the Nazis weren't authentic enough? Yes, you wanted a better quality Nazi. Yes, this was the most American Nazi I have ever heard. Yeah, it ruined the immersion a little bit. It was like, yeah. Took it right out. This is this. This is German. No, that is not. What is he doing? That's a bit weird. Yeah, so there's a lot of reasons why. I mean, the casting is one thing, but so the the production history. So part of the reason why it feels so naive is they tried to develop it in the 90s.

So off the back of the success of Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger did want to keep making more Harrison Ford, Jack Ryan movies and they picked this novel. In this novel, Jack Ryan is like deputy director of Central Intelligence. He's really senior. He's obviously come up through the ranks off the back of what's happened in Patriot, Clear and Present Danger and so on. But they couldn't, they couldn't get Harrison Ford because he was too busy. He was doing like The Fugitives, Sabrina, The Devil's Own and then Air Force, 1-6 Days, seven Nights.

So like his 90s dance card was completely full. So that kind of shelved the project for a bit. And then weirdly, it's Ben Affleck himself who approached Paramount offering to play the role based off his recent success as an Oscar winning screenwriter with Matt Damon for Goodwill Hunting. And then he'd been in a bunch of Kevin Smith movies and then the Pearl Harbour and and then you see him with this and yeah, he's just like so young. But This is why Tom Clancy kind of says this is I'm the guy who wrote the book that this film completely ignored.

And I got big mad and did that. If you if you guys listen to the the commentary track for this movie, I have not know. OK, there's a Tom Mcclancy commentary track for this film. They got Tommy C on the mumble track. Oh my God. And he is big mad. Like he is just going off. It's iconic. If you go on IMDb on the quotes, I think there's like a couple of quotes from the commentary track in the IMDb quotes list because he's so good. Like that never happens. Yeah, so big mad Ken Affleck's of course came off Armageddon as well before this.

So he was like a viable young leading man now and he wanted to make a franchise. And I think we offered him like 10 million for this movie. So he was like always to the bank, but not to be it's it's Marcus. Like Pearl Harbour feels like last 1990s film than this, even though it came out earlier. More, more on the cusp of the Millennium, you know, because it came out 2001, didn't it? Yeah, Yeah. And and yet it feels like it came out later. I mean, it's been a long time since I watched it. But when like you, you know, you know what that is Michael Bay, man, Michael Bay.

Michael Bay who made some of the most 90s movie ever. But he just like his style. Just like it's like Tony Scotch pervades through. Yeah. It's actually a very fairpoint. It's very, very nimble. Just doing the little tweaks that he has to do to remain current. There's that big phase. I'm Michael Bay friend who he went teal and orange for a bit. Yeah. When he's doing Transformers to fit in with the zeitgeist. And then recently I watched Ambulance and Jesus Christ man, Incredible Michael Bay. I mean, I don't want to, I do not want to cover Pill Harbour for this podcast necessarily, but I could.

I think it's the one film that would make us all equally angry. That fucking scene when someone shoots down a Japanese fighter playing the shotgun. Yeah man, my favourite scene is when you see Karen Dave frigates behind them. That is a Knox class frigate.

They had Harry Turtles as a as a script. Guy on it was like, like, like, like, like. Clearly they mixed up the attack on Pearl Harbour with the Philadelphia Experiment. What they did was you see the pulled in like alternative history maven fucking Harry Turtledove, just a writer and he's like Knox class frigates in 1941. Yes, that actually happened because it's time travelling Americans going back in time to help the to help the non time travelling Americans. God bless Harry Theldov, absolute absolute machine of a guy.

Speaking of weird things, I don't think I want to bring up before we get into like the plot blow by blow was the the differences between the book and the movie. So again, this movie was in development for a long time and one of the one of the big misapprehensions people have about the movie is that because it was produced during the gap, well, it started production and it was released and in the middle of that happened 911, right? So a lot of people think that they did like reshoots, so they rewrote stuff and they changed stuff because of 911.

It's not the case. The film was wrapped, it filmed it and wrapped it by June 2001. So they didn't change anything necessarily. They just kind of maybe delayed it a little bit. But all the major changes to the plot are all already in there. So the book itself is this classic like Tom Clancy, hang on like like here's Patriot games, right Patriot like that isn't Sean Bean and like like 1 Libyan terrorist camp like but I've read it yet. But I bet there's shit tonnes of extra stuff in there and this is no different.

So like the sum of All Fears has got this mad plot where Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Jack Ryan is trying to head up essentially like a 1990s version of the Board of Peace to create like Jerusalem as its own free city state, like the Vatican, presided over by like a group of like a panel of different religious leaders across various different religious denominations. So he wants to create a theocracy in in Jerusalem, right. And then and then it's going to be protected by like a detachment of the Swiss Guard.

Like that's a whole thing in this in this book. That's that's crazy. There's a whole other support I'm going to bring up. But it's like there's a whole support between like a a woman who is trying to become like a senior advisor to the president starts having an affair with the president in this film, who's played by James Cromwell, President Fowler. And then she like gets her job by getting another guy bent off his job by creating a scandal that he had like a child at wedlock. She tries the same thing on on Jack Ryan and then like Jack Ryan sends like Ding Chavez and John John Clark, like his two best wet work operators to go and convince his wife that he's loyal.

Still like got a super secret mission for you, Like bring bring your silences, bring your NV GS. I need to go and talk to my wife. There's a whole thing in the fucking fly on the wall and just. Not talking to anyone.

Me thinks, me thinks the deputy director of the Central Intelligence has stopped process too much. And then it is like a disenfranchised Palestinian Muslim who goes rogue and then teams up with like an East German fella to to get this nuke to like America to make a point. And that's as close as this movie like used to the plot is that there is a nuke and it isn't like disputed territory between Israel and Palestine. Yeah. But so, yeah, my, my, my main point was it's not like Lilu and Stitch where like they had to like redraw the end sequence because it's not a plane crashing, it's a spaceship crashing.

Now, this is already the same and they kind of left it the same, which is kind of cool that they did it. They they went through with it. Yeah, actually balls to be honest, that the dead kind of like push through it and there is this dramatic shift in the middle of the film around that time when around the point when the nuke goes off and just turns Baltimore, MD and body more Maryland and and some are getting a little bit probably after that scene. The film seems to be shot a totally different way, picks up a totally different vibe.

And that's one thing that makes us somebody special is that this one does that kind of show really like the kind of major epoch change that that 911 brought on, because to beat the shit out of a dead horse, 911 changed everything. You know, I mean as as that one particular line Family Guy said, but it's like so the film after the nuke goes off for a start, getting ahead of ourselves, like the the way it's shot immediately afterwards is redolent of the kind of film footage from around that time. And like like media footage from all the time.

You see a lot more of like a shakey, calm handycam kind of stuff you mentioned that would then be popularised like the Bourne films, not full on crazy shakey calm, but there's more of it. The cinematography. The film goes from having a lot of like wide open vistas and stuff and like a lot like big, big like location shots to like a lot of tight close-ups of people in rooms being sweaty, being freaked out. And it's immediately, and I laugh and we're all fucking sweaty and freaked out. You know, you know what?

That's a really itchy observation. And this is probably a good opportunity to talk about the director. So Phil Alden Robinson directed this before this Sneakers, which is a really good film that we probably should cover at some point with Robert Redford. But on top of that, which I think is closer to your point is, and I watched it last night, the first episode of Band of Brothers and is also one of the directorial credits. Now, obviously in a, in a, in a mini series like that of the producers. So, you know, Spielberg and and Hanks, who also directed an episode, have a much bigger say on creating the visual language for because it's got to remain consistent throughout the whole thing, right?

Nevertheless, Phil Alden Robinson's first episode career, he has got like a few visual signifiers that I think aren't really repeated again elsewhere in the show's run. So the first thing this is repeated, the first thing you see is like, there's a lot more like shaky Cam, right? Banda brothers is not dated in the way this film is dated because of that. This is that's something timeless about it. It looks like archival footage from the period, which is really good because it gets you like up close into the action.

So there's a sequence, for example, where they're in old born down down South in the UK where they're doing like their final sort of preparations for D-Day training. So they're and they're doing like sort of a collective training. So they're doing like, like manoeuvres and so like that. And one of the bits they do is they do all the like close combat bayonet training and stuff. And clearly they've put like the actual actors through like a couple of weeks of this stuff as well before they did it.

And it's kind of comes across in in the filming. I swear to God, I'm coming back to your point because like what it what it gives you though, is it gives you that kind of gritty like you're in in the face of it kind of like this is what it was like at the time. These guys are really preparing to go to war. And then finally you see it just before they are about to depart for the actual on the, you know, the day of days they're about to go and, you know, attack fortress Europa, They have a they're reading the speech.

And then we got a sequence where all the individual paratroopers look dead eye into the camera like brick the 4th wall. It's the only time that happens in the show. They all break the 4th wall, look into the camera and you just see these guys like the artifice of like we're watching a war show just like ghost. And it's just like we're looking into the guy and it's it's down to like how good the actors are. And it's another great thing about bandit brothers is that and you'll see if you watch it again recently, it's like it's full.

It is the most that guy show. It's full of people who are now like a list actors and because they've picked like really good talented actors to do these really small roles and you get that. And then the other thing you get after that is the the sequence of like Dick Winters, like helping every individual power tripper up and get him into the plane. Great. Anyway, back to the movie. Like it's it's that appreciation of like that visual and that that language that I think he really brings to it by, as you say, in the second-half of the movie, getting up close and personal people again, he's hamstrung by the productions kind of probably need for it to be like a glossy big budget blockbuster.

This is like this in May, so early summer blockbuster kind of thing that we're going for reboot a franchise. They weren't trying to do something as gritty as this, but they were doing something shocking. So yeah, cool. Very cool. The final thing I want to bring up before we get into the movie properly, this movie has a video game adaptation. Yep, and it's not terrible. It's not like the hunt for electrical one, which was like which was like awful. This game, the sum of all fears to spoil the movie takes place entirely in like the final montage of the of the movie was really what's really strange.

So basically is a Red Storm entertainment who who had made Rainbow 6 and by this point Rainbow 6 rug spear as well. And I think they made the first Ghost Recon game as well. I think had this engine had this tactical squad shooter game genre, which they kind of pioneered and they basically went, we'll make one of those and we'll call it some of our fears basically. And they kind of watered it down a little bit. So you lost like the deep planning aspects of it. The tactical squad controls were much reduced and your squad size was reduced from like I think a maximum of 6 down to like 3.

But all you can do is kind of tell your squad bits like follow hold, which was this part. Tell any tell any youngbloods who are listening that when we see Rainbow 6 mean the original 1 from 1999, we don't mean the kind of Rainbow 6 Siege kind of stuff. More like recent kind of stuff that looks like a totally fucking different game. First person shooter was really quite in depth, as you said, like planning phases. They gave me a lifelong love of CQB. It wasn't the heavy metals in the water or the autism or anything.

It was definitely Rainbow 6 and 999 that made me love CQB. One of the first games, I think, don't quote me on this. I don't think it is the first game, but one of the first very popular games at least to have localised limb damage in a first person shooter so you could cripple limbs. And then the other big thing I think for me was your, your damage as the as as the player incredibly nerved. Like like real life, like you can't take like 2020 shotgun blast and then pick the health pack. Like you get shot in the head, you're dead, You get shot in the chest, you are going to die.

If you get shot twice, you are dead, which is, you know, very, very, very cool at the time. Well, I mean, annoying at the time as a kid that like very, very cool now in my respect, just just like pioneered so much cool stuff that I really did and I'm great like level design as well. And it was like so much fun. Like set the start the game like having a little kind of blueprint map of like the building you were going to storm and like layout your route to approach and stuff like, oh, this is this is the stuff this like, yeah.

Awesome. So this game takes place, like I said, in like that, that final montage, the movie, which we'll talk about in a bit, but basically you are not in the movie at all. You are like a separate team. Yeah, the main events of the film have already passed. You're here cleaning up basically the remaining people who have done bad stuff in the movie with your squad, and you're getting like, mission briefs from John Clark, not voiced by Lee Schrieber. And Jack Ryan is not mentioned because why would he be?

Bill Cabot's not mentioned. Who died anyway? Sad, sad face. Spoilers. Kathy Mueller not mentioned. No one else in the movie has mentioned. You're literally getting dropped off to do stuff. And that first mission I think takes place in like ATV station that's been taken over by like some like white neo Nazi terrorists in like Colorado or something. Like it's so divorced from what's going on in the movie. But yeah, no, it's really interesting. We're talking about. It's a pretty interesting artefact.

It's also the first game that that's been made from one of the movies that's still probably pretty playable. So yeah, no, cool. And the final thing, the actual final thing I want to talk about before we get into the movie was John Clark leaves. Schreiber plays John Clark in this movie. He's the there are three John Clark's kind of which you'll probably bring up in a second out there in the wild at the main one that most people will know from clear and present danger is Willem Dafoe. He's obviously a bit big and broad and appears to be like a super like past it kind of veteran, just like he's like he's got CIA kind of written all over him.

This guy is probably pews closer to I think the source material in the sense that he's like this kind of closed up button up kind of wet work operator who's a bit like, I don't know. He's very, very intense in a way that like woman to foe isn't. Woman to foe is kind of a bit bit loose and wild in the story of what could have been the God of many Thorpes paths. They were talking about after the success of this film, making a Lief Schreiber John Clark franchise, where they were going to make potential movies of Rainbow 6 and of Red Rabbit with Leave Leave Schreiber reprising his role as John Clark.

And then they started early production on Without Remorse, which is sort of a John Clark novel, but it got stalled for a very long time. Lee Schreiber went off and did a bunch of different projects, including like Salt, and then he was in Ray Donovan for a very long time and did like 82 episodes of that and had a completely different career. And then it happened and then it came to pass and eventually in 2021, they finally released Without Remorse starring Michael B Jordan, written by Taylor Sheridan, which I thought was worth mentioning.

So obviously based on a novel by Tom Clancy, by Taylor Sheridan, who most people will know now for like his tonne of Paramount TVTV shows like The Land and and Yellowstone and Tulsa Kings and stuff like that. But also he wrote the movie we're going to cover next week, which is Sicario. So interesting, but your factoid about Without Remorse, please. Yes, my factoid is that in the film, the Michael B Jordan film, he's actually called John Kelly in it. But in Without Remorse, the novel, it does begin with, you know, like introduces Clark as being called John Kelly.

He changes his name later on in his career, which which which I thought was actually pretty cool. Obviously it's like a totally different kind of chronology for it because without remorse is Vietnam War novel with a very young, obviously John, John John Kelly before he becomes John Clark. I totally agree with you that like leave Schreiber players like a much more kind of button down kind of restrained kind of John Clark. Like you've seen the later novels. I mean, John Clark's full on fucking psycho and without remorse and he clearly works all the psycho shit out before he then becomes like the button down, very measured kind of killer that years and they later posts and stuff.

Yeah. And so yeah, I haven't seen the Metal B Jordan film. I'll probably watch it at some point. I was actually explaining to Emma just about how many like Jax Ryan and how many like John's, John's clock have been. And she was like, what the fuck? I'm sick of this. There's so many Jack Ryan's. It's like you haven't even got the bit with a telly about how Jack Ryan becomes president by accident at the end of Debt of Honour. And man, she was angry. I think. I think it's worth saying that obviously on this podcast, we talk about it all the time, but I think I don't think like Jack Ryan.

Is that that well in there? I mean, the TV show has probably helped, but before the TV show, I don't. And obviously they put his name in that Shadow Recruit movie, like Jack Ryan shadow Recruit before that. So at this point, it's time in 2002, like I don't think Jack Ryan necessarily was the franchise. It was. It was Tom Clancy. People people heard of Tom Clancy because he was, you know, this, this this book debuted at number one of the best sellers list, that kind of thing. So people knew Tom Clancy was I don't think people were like, oh, Jack Ryan, that character that Harrison Ford plays or you know, I'm sure there are fans and stuff, but I don't think I have the same cultural kind of presence and it hasn't got it has got a massive cultural presence.

Now people know there's a Jack Ryan TV show. I don't think you ask the average person on the street, Oh, did you know that the character that Tom Currency is playing in that TV shows the same character that Harrison Ford was in those movies and Ben Rafik was in that movie and Alec Baldwin was in that movie? I don't think that that's there, you know? Yeah. And now, weirdly, I think Tom Clancy, the name is kind of bigger in the gaming world because of, like, Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6, Tom Clancy's The Division.

Yeah. Tom Clancy's End War and all that stuff. Tom Clancy's like Ghost Recon. Yeah. And then suppose you don't have, you know, and then I suppose you know, what is all that weird? Kind of like we died in 2013. Since then there's been like, I don't know how many ghostwritten novels and like Tom Clancy's Op Centre, Tom Clancy's Net Force and John Ryan's had about 5 terms as president now I think Bryan Junior as well. Another thing that made my wife really pissed off when I said like President Jack Ryan's A5 term tyrant by this point, just like what the fuck?

Yeah, I skipped some of All Fears, mainly because kind of at that point in my novel reading, I was kind of piggybacking off stuff me dad had. So I was like very much in the dad zone, which is a vibe. But I've still carried on this day in my taste in films, obviously in books and stuff. And so there wasn't a copy of some of All Fears in the house. There was a copy of a Patriot Games was a copy of of the Kremlin, stuff like that. But I've seen a lot of discourse about how some of Orpheus is not a good book in the Jack Ryan series.

I've heard it comes in for some serious dinging from people. It's extremely dense. So some of the other weird stuff that's in the book that that isn't in the movie. So off the back of the hunt for October, the US Navy now has a submarine based on the same pulse drive technology, the Caterpillar drive. Yeah. And that that gets makes a reappearance and gets into gets involved. There's a whole bunch of stuff. So obviously we've talked a bit about like America and Russia are getting like whipped up to a frenzy.

There's also at the same time, John Clark is in Mexico City and these terrorists are like trying to implicate the Ayatollah in on the on the attack on, on Baltimore as well. There's Jesus Christ, Wells is on here. So yeah, the, the, the, the, the there's a smaller group, the Popular Front of the version of Palestine terrorists also involved. Basically, it's like it's a big like took a season's finale. Like everybody's there. Like it's it's like everyone has ever been on a Jack Ryan novel at some point has popped up in this one to kind of like, because it's the sum you see of all fears of all fears.

So it's like that's almost every. Shark. It sounded a bit like like it was devolving into that Monty Python sketch from Life of Brian. It's like the Popular Front is also made like which front? The Palestinian Liberation Liberation Front of Palestine. Yeah, and who's that guy? We don't talk to them. Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely wild. I'm going to, I'm going to read you a section from the the Wikipedia article about the book about, about the woman who's trying to start the affair thing. So White House foreign affairs advisor Elizabeth Elliott holds a grudge against Ryan and a guy called Alden who is a national security advisor, Doctor Charles Alden, and manoeuvres against them.

She first takes Alden's job as national security advisor by taking advantage of a sex scandal involving a child fathered by Alden out of wedlock, with the stress contributing to Alden's death in a severe stroke, which causes a blowout fracture. She then concurrently begins a sexual relationship with the widow's president, J Robert Fowler JRF, and manipulates him to publicly admit Ryan's role in the peace settlement. That's the that's the Mass of Jerusalem thing. Taking credit for himself. After Ryan accuses her of wishing to silence an American opponent of the deal, Elliot engineers a smear campaign, accusing Ryan of engaging in an extramarital affair and fathering a child with a young widow.

Jack's friends say operatives John Clark and Domingo Chavez convince Ryan's wife, Kathy, that the allegations are false. I want to agree that scene. Jack's alleged mistress is Carol Zimmer, widow of Buck Zimmer, who was killed during Ryan and Clark's early mission to rescue Chavez and his army teammates from Colombia. That's the events of Clear and Present Danger. Ryan Layer decides to retire from the Saye, but not before he puts together a covert operation to uncover crypt dealings between Japanese and Mexican government officials.

Like, this is all over the place. That's that's mad. Like this is like, I reckon if you'd if you'd went to Stanley Kubrick with this book, yeah, 1970s and said make a movie of this, he would have said exactly the same thing he said when he was received a copy of The Lord of the Rings. No, I can't do it. It can't be done. And yet Phil Olen Robinson and my God, yeah. Has has done it with the the efforts of a screenwriter, Paul Tenacio and Daniel Pyne. I need to find out what he's done before because he's he's done some magic here.

I'll tell you one thing, though, with the salacious kind of content that you've talked about and the sex scandals, this means this is going to be another Tom Clancy novel. With Tom Clancy's we had way of writing sex scenes and probably we had dialogue. Do you think this might have its own version of that? That CIA officer being called by his Japanese girlfriend, Master Sausage, Chinese girl. I was going to say. I knew you were going to come again. Would it have a sausage in it? Yeah, because, because Japanese and Mexican.

So it's going to be like Japanese sausage, Mexican chorizo. Like it's gone. No, it's like she smiled at him and said, Senor, I love your burrito. Please, please superimpose an image of Gordon Ramsay saying sausage onto the video here.

Please. Yeah, that's gonna be bad. I think You know what I think we should have like fucking some of Wolfie has book club. Like like in the last season model had parroted rugged book club lover. Some of Wolfie has book club and see how fuck Dick gets. Welcome to the CIA sport. At a time of increasing tension. According to this, there are 17 senior scientists on duty today. I only count 14. Deliberate deception. Three Russian scientists are missing. I need to know where they are, so I'm. Going the missions, I just write reports.

So write a report about it. I'm an analyst, I'm not trained for this. Just be my eyes and ears.

I can't be with somebody who's going to keep their life hidden from me, Jack. I will not let that happen. New enemies don't fight Russia and America. You get to Russia and America to fight each other and destroy each other. Only two men suspect the truth. What's? The South African doing in the Ukraine. Three Russian scientists crate from Israel. Fair guess they're building a bomb. From The Electrifying Bestseller by Tom Clancy. The crate was put on a cargo freighter headed for the East Coast. What and the producer of Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games?

Is in play. Ben. Affleck, where's the president now? They're. Taking him airborne, they think it might be the Russians it. Wasn't the Russians. Morgan Freeman. It adds up. You just don't like what it adds up to if. You strike against the Russians, you sacrifice your moral authority. We have reason to believe the bomb was the work of. Terrorists, not the Russians, Mr. President just scrambling the fighters my. Orders are to get the right information to the people who make the decision. Put it in your report.

And if you shut me out? Your family and 25,000,000 other families will be dead.

The Sum of All Fears directed by Phil Alden Robinson.

The year is 1973. During the Yom Kippur War, an Israeli warplane carrying a nuclear bomb crashes. First of all, I don't want to keep doing this, but why is it carrying a nuclear bomb like it's disputed territory? Was it was Egypt. We're going to make Egypt, I think. I mean, I mean, it's such a strange, such a shame that such a strange clancey ish idea that the Israelis put up a doomsday plane that's a boss Skyhawk, just a scooter tooling around unescorted on its own with an atom bomb hanging underneath underneath it.

And it's like weird, it gets shot down and it and it gets shot down because I think the pilot was in scratches by looking at a picture of his family. It's like, did you have it your ass, man? Yeah, you're the wall playing here. He, he, he has to hit a little bit of turbulence, doesn't he? And and like, as as like family's food or candy played also. Yeah. And and he's like, oh, gonna pick that up. And then whatever reason, like this plane doesn't have like a radar warning indicator or anything. And he's got like a, an old school fucking essay 2 or whatever it is just fucking home again on him.

And it's like by dickhead. And what do you know, the rogue atom bomb baby broken. I think it's buried. Buried by the shifting sands. And nobody ever goes looking for it. Yeah, they've lost that. And no one thinks, you know what, let's go and finds that. I find it hard to believe that Israel would not look for like their one borrowed nuke. Yeah, I mean. If he shackles man. Because because, like, I mean, you would have them being like, well, we're not not like technically avowing fucking avowedly nuclear nation, right?

Like, no, we haven't got nukes. Don't look at the stockpile under under under those those newspapers. But on the other hand, they certainly wouldn't want the possibility of a nuke hanging out in, you know, what could be potentially enemy territory to them. Like there would have been some kind of a a hunt for it, right. I mean, I'm pretty sure they could have, could have at least put some legwork into looking for it. Yeah. But it's Tom Dancy. And a lot of the stuff that he puts in it was books for them to work.

Kind of doesn't fully need to make sense for the Tom Clancy book to commence, I think. So he doesn't put too much thought into it. Yeah. Exactly. What's happened to you? So 30 years pass and then Gatsi, A Syrian scrap collector, recovers the bomb from a field in the Golan Heights and sells it to a South African and black market arms trafficker called Derrick Olson, played by Comfield. I think he resells it to a neo Nazi group led by an Austrian billionaire called Richard Dressler who is our our big bad in the movie.

So your your man. The South African black market arms trafficker Derrick Olson kind of tricks the guy in clients often says it's a dud and says useless but you'll buy often for £400 and then sells it for like hundreds of thousands straight away. That's a bullshit move isn't it? The poor guy, his son who recovered the bomb is obviously got like radiation poisoning is dying. So it's real bad. Cool. And then we get Richard Dresler, who's this Australian billionaire. It's always billionaires, isn't it?

Fucking giving some speech at some sort of seminar symposium about the world order and how he needs to fundamentally change and stuff. And then we get a shot where it lingers and zooms in on his watch, which is taken off and and left on the lectern and zooms in and we see the back of the watch and there is an engraved swastika. So we knew he's a wrong and real, real bad stuff. And then I guess we cut away from that pretty, pretty early. And then we meet Jack Ryan. Right. I just want to jump in with something before I meet Jack Ryan, though.

Yeah. Yeah. The Storm's kind of ahead of its time in, like, kind of going after the billionaires kind of thing in a way. Oh, yeah. What do you think about a cabal of billionaires who basically want to run the world? Yeah. Topical like that would ever happen. Yeah, absolutely. Pay no attention. That island, Yeah, I think. A bunch of billionaires would ever invade, enable the rise of the far right. Exactly. Like that was ever going to happen. It's weird isn't people accused them of changing this movie at the time to make it less like thorny because of like 11, but actually they just kind of pull out the magic fucking pen and predicted and predicted the future.

But it's. Like and coincidentally, it just has that one country pop up in it. But it's like, yeah, fucking this. This really does like show cabals of rich technocrats as being an existential threat to the world and this kind of gets largely overpowered by like the the cabals of like people from the sandy regions of the planet being the big existential threat for quite a few years in film land. After this. You know which which we're just like circling back now to the get the guillotine S for everybody who's he was a billionaire, you know, kind of thing.

But this one was a bit ahead of its time and the fact that the people involved in it are as as villains are racist, without a doubt, authoritarian, authoritative, powerful, very rich. And I think that's just interesting. I think it's interesting combination, and it's something that wasn't really a huge thing in film at the time. He had got like villains and thrillers who were like billionaires and stuff like that. But it was always, I'm a billionaire and I'm going to kill half the planet for my twisted means because I need more money or some shit like that.

But it's never like I'm a billionaire and I'm going to destroy America and Russia in a nuclear war that's totally going to kill the rest of the world, right, Just because I fucking hate black people, you know? Yeah, it's. Sorry. Go on. I. Was going to say it is in a way, but it also isn't. I like going on a limb here, but Evil German Guy really isn't a very, very new concept for films. It's pretty safe. And yeah, and like half of the Bond franchise has like a very evil guy with a German accent doing shit, trying to control the world.

Yeah, so. It's not really that that rare, it's just that connects the the evil people trope with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think if you remember like it was time the most popular video game genre for like a Zone 2 probably until 2012, it was like World War 2 shooter colour shade brown, wasn't it? Yeah. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of like Russians and Russians and Germans for the two big bad guys. Just kind of fight falls with this but really important point you made about the billionaires, I think.

I think what this film where it stumbles is it's a little bit naive and that Dressler doesn't have any fingers in the pies of the American government. Yeah, that's that's clearly the bit that we are learning about now in real time, every 24 hours, something more heinous corruption between be it our government or be it like the American government with all that, that mental shit that's happening at the minute. I don't want to go into too much detail about it, but because that's just here. Have a good time, man.

But I think it's really naive that they clean house at the end. Like that, that that that montage sequence that they made the video game off at the at the end where they just between Russia and and and the United States go around and just sort it all out by killing them all. Like like that's that's incredibly cathartic to watch, but but isn't happening, is it? Let's be real. I mean. In fairness, it is. It's probably safe to assume that that network is pretty much larger than the three people we see getting killed off.

So we've no inclination or indication to to know that like all the corrupt people from the Russian military command structure have actually been removed, etcetera. Yeah, it's a very fairpoint actually. Those assassinations could just be seen as a very obvious gesture of political goodwill towards one another. And take out a few parties. That's it. It's like, yeah, we, we we both kind of don't like them. And if we blow up these three, we can just forget about everything. And would anyone like to invest in infrastructure in Baltimore by the chance?

Enron just rolling up and filling an oilfield about Baltimore used to pay. It's like like president dropping an AI slop. Video of of like golden hotels in Baltimore. Jesus Christ, after the bomb it was Balta less. We're going to make it Baltimore again. If I was Baltimore, but it's going to be balty beautiful now. After that sort of introductory sequence, we we see a very young fresh faced Jack Ryan played by my God, he looks like a baby Ben Affleck. I watched the rips of a week and just seeing the difference.

Time comes to resolve. He looks great still because he's incredibly rich, but he just looks like a baby in this. Yeah, wonderful. And he's working in the Russia desk. So he's watching videos of the Russian President. He's called Zorkin. President Zorkin, played by Richard Mana from yes. So he's great. I know him from I know him from this a lower level and The Dirty doesn't where he works like a little Kim's caboose and the the big fancy home at the very end of the movie. That's all I know him from anyway.

He's tremendous. Yeah. So he's he's there and he's having a bit of banter with these guys in his office about like, you're thinking of Chelitsky, but you mean Chepitsky. And it's wrong. And it's just like, what the fuck are you guys talking about? I don't know Russian stuff. We're. We're going to get the idea that they're really good at the jobs because they know who all the Russians are. Jack Ryan is doing that. And he's also having a very new and exciting relationship with a doctor from Baltimore Memorial Hospital, young Kathy Mueller.

Who would of course, become Kathy Ryan, but she doesn't know that yet, and she is played by what is her name again? I'll tell you who it is. It's John Wick's dead wife. John Wick's dead wife. It's John Wick's dead wife, Bridget Moynahan. Yeah. And I say John Wick said wife because even though she's in John Wick for, like, all of three minutes, that's still only her top 4 credits on IMDb. Coyote Wiggly, as well as what she was in. Wasn't she? Bridget Moynahan? Anyway, so what's happening? They have an adorable little thing where she.

And this is unhinged. Like they're on their third date. They're in bed at his place. And then she says there's something I've got to talk to you about. And he's like, what? And he's like, you're in love with me. And I get it. I get it. I get it. Yeah. That's such a ballsy move. Like, if that could have gone either way. Yeah. And then they that a page goes off, She thinks it's hers because she has a real job at a hospital and she believes that he's a historian through think tank. So why would his page be going off early on Sunday morning?

But it is his page. Historically ventures dropped.

Happens all the time to me. Going to happen soon. And then he is paged by director William Cabot Morgan Freeman to accompany him to well to come into a meeting about the sudden, unexpected death. Death of President Zorkin and his replacement by Kieran Kieran. Kieran Hines, Kieran Hines, who who plays president number of Kieran Hines. So they and that's posting of Kieran Hines's number of was predicted by a young Jack Ryan and that gets him a seat at the table in a very high profile meeting with the president's cabinet.

He is told by William Cabot very much to sit down and shut up and and if you're not spoken to, don't speak. But and this is a classic like Jack Ryan thing. It happened in it's happened in all of them. I think it's, it definitely happened in October. He gets called into a super secret, like high, high, high level meeting that he's like fucking 10, pay grades too low to be in. And then God damn it, he's such a Boy Scout. He has to say his bit of information. Oh no, he just seems like a hardliner, but he's not really hardliner.

He's just saying hardline stuff to keep the hardline off your back. But actually he's really progressive and it makes enough of a stir that he gets brought along with Cabot to E Russian nuclear weapons facility to conduct a inspection of the dealing process as part of the START treaty. I will pause that for questions. I like How so? First of all, an incredibly cursed part of the film is when it's it's implied that Kathy grabs his Dick while he's on the phone to covers. Like, I mean, she does, doesn't she?

She grabs, she grabs. She grabs his junk while he's on the phone in a cupboard from bed. And it's like she's a pistol. This edition of Coffee, That's how you. That's how he knows that she's the one. Yeah. What? What? Didn't need that really cringe kind of close up of Ben, of Ben Affleck and Bridget Morgan's feet together. No, I was getting, I was getting shades of the Animal Crackers scene from Armageddon, like scenes that didn't need to be made and put into a movie, didn't need, didn't need to exist.

Do you remember this, Sonia? The animal crackers scene from Armageddon. No. It's Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler. Liv Tyler is playing the daughter of Harry Stamper, Bruce Willis, and they have a young budding relationship and he's put to go to the asteroid that's flinging towards earth to blow it up. But before he goes there last night, they have together and he's got these little animal cracker cookies and he's walking them along her bare midriff and doing like an Australian for some reason, impression of of of doing that umbrella.

He's like he's like the get the giraffe walks along the Serengeti and it's like he's not Australian, but OK, And this is really cringe. Cringe. I liked how you also see the beginning of a trend of a Bill Cabot just taking things off people to give them to Jack Ryan. He takes that lads, there you go. And the guys fuck. And obviously we'll see this again later in the movie. So then he's obviously easing off the races to Russia, isn't he? And there's this great bit when he's meeting Nemerov and and a reference is made to how much, how much pussy Nemerov got in, in college because, because Jack Ryan wrote about it in his, in his, in, in like a thesis or something, or some report that he did.

And one of and, and like Nam Ross henchman's like, oh, well, actually, you know, he, he had a girlfriend from a second year of college. And Jack Ryan's like, yeah, but you were fucking crushing it in your first year. I paraphrase. And you speak amazing Russian. And it's just like that bit in 100 October where he starts speaking Russian to prove them that he speaks Russian. And it's like, yeah, sorted. I like this guy. Yeah. It's like we're friends kind of thing. And it's like, in that case, I like him, too.

I love that. He's brilliant. Yeah. Great. I love that. Just before that cab Cabot, Will Cabot absolutely annihilates Ryan because he has to. He has to cry off on his date with Kathy. Yeah. So he calls her from, like, the plane they're flying and he. And like, and he's like, don't don't lie to her. Just just tell her where you're going. Tell her who you work for. I know you're in the CIA. She'll, she'll think it's cool. Just tell her. So he's like, all right, OK, well, I've, I've been called up by the director to go to Russia to do a nuclear arms inspection.

I'm in the CIA and she's like, fuck off. And like comes up the phone. What the fuck is this bullshit from this MOID that I've been with for like 3 or 4 days, three days. And then it's like he's given me the three days. This is it. So like you go remember, this is like a hangover from the 90s. So you know, dates one and two chased date three bag off right. And then to her mind, to her mind, they've they've had their third date. He's hit it and then now he's saying he's in the Sayer and he's going to Russia.

It's like, oh, oldest trick in the boot wild. It's like this, this is this is Jack Ragan. They hit it and quitted Moid. Isn't it really? He's like, he's like, oh, he'd be getting the biggest call out post on Reddit if it was a thing at that point. Smash and Nash. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Hey, girl, he's all we dating the same guy. Works for a think tank. Few nice dates now tells you is offered. There was some nuclear de escalation disarmament shit with the company. It's like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Same guy.

Same guy. Ryan. Yeah. Super Catholic. We had opinions about abortion. Yeah, that's the guy. Avoid.

Oh, man. So, yeah, they get to to go to Russia. They meet Nemerov. There's a little bit in the nuclear facility where like Jack Ryan senses something's wrong and he says like 3 of your guys aren't here today and all that kind of stuff. And then he gets a real super quick answer from Michael Byrne, who was the kill in intelligence. Yeah, Michael Byrne gives a really quick answer about where all the scientists are. And he gives like the staff answer, like the official answer and and he and he seems like he's a bad guy.

Is he called Gorkov? I want to say I believe keeping track of these Russian names is for the hard work. Michael Michael Byrne plays. Yeah. Anatoli Grushkov. Man, ever so close. Yeah. Who's obviously kind of like, shown as, like, Benny Blair kind of kind of hidden, hidden antagonist kind of guy. But as we all know, it's a spoiler cast. He turns out to be not such a hidden antagonist. It turns out to be a very good guy called under the code name Spinnaker, which immediately makes me think of Portsmouth.

Yeah, right. Cool. Yes, we have that. And then I'm going to pick it up from the old Wikipedia summary. Ryan knows is the absence of three scientists listed in the facilities roster after receiving intelligence from Spinnaker, an informant inside the Kremlin. So it's actually the same guy, but we don't know yet. Cabot Sense operative John Clark to investigate. And this is great because another hilarious thing in the film is that on the flight back, obviously your boy, right, Jack Ryan is kicking off saying, like, Kathy won't return my calls.

She's so pissed off at me, like, like, I've ruined it. And he's like, look, tell you what, Take it to the tickets to the White House correspondent dinner. And he's like, oh, yeah, I was talking to the White correspondents today. How we going to do that? I happen to have some tickets for you, like the name John Clark and then then the playing lads. He's like, ah, John Clark, I've got a job for you by Exquisite Sale. Yeah, yes. Oh, hey, John, how are you enjoying working at a desk? And John's standing there like the fucking pissing rain going through go going through a CIA humiliation ritual, clearly.

And he's like, how'd I get desk job? What do you like to go off and do some other active stuff? And I'm going to ruin you a chance to go to this nice event. And he's like the job in it, you know, life in a blue one. Yeah. I look because I look. Yeah. Life in a blue 1. You can't take a joke. Joins John Clark. And, like, I love that it comes up later as well. I was, man, so funny. Look about that when it happens. So funny. Yeah, what I've learned so far is that the big difference between Admiral Grier, who seemed like a pretty swell guy, and Director William Cabot is like Cabot is an absolute seeing off prick.

He's just this fucking like low key agent of chaos. It's a goblin. He's no key chaos goblin like 3 assets dignified guy and covets like he he he today will cause problems on purpose. I love it. He's meant he's a serious job. Well, stop. Stop. Yeah, fucking around with these guys lives. Yeah. That's like, come on man. That's so we then we cut to the White House Correspondents dinner pretty much immediately. And it's yeah, you get this awesome speech from I say it's awesome. Yeah. Funny speech from the president.

The president is called President Fowler. He's played by James Cromwell, who nominated for an Oscar for Babe. That old zoo pig iconic line delivery also is like incredible as as I've got the name of the guys, Morgan or something in LA Confidential. He's the, he's the the bent police captain in, in, in LA Confidential. Brilliant. Rollo Tomasi. Who's that anyway? Wonderful. So, yeah, he's doing a whole speech about it, like how he's like married into his family. That's got a lot of electoral votes.

And then and then he smokes some weed. CA 54 electoral votes. Yeah. Like it's, it is legitimately a really quite funny speech. He's got quite good comic time and his delivery is really good. It's really interesting because So what we've seen so far of the president is we see him do the the drill like the the nuclear football drill. Yes, we're messed up it out. Shit. Yeah, we'll talk about it because it's all coming up because they actually do it for real, don't they? And Ally. So we'll talk about then.

Sorry, is sirens. Is that yours? Is that your end, Sonia? I have no fucking idea what's happening in this city again. Panic on the streets of Hamburg. Panic on the streets of East Hartford. I wonder to myself, oh, wow. Yeah. So we get all that we get. So they did that big drill at the beginning. Yeah. Again, seems to go pretty professionally. All the, all the all the odds are there giving them all the, you know, the briefings about like, what's happening with the missile and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then he has that funny bit where he takes a phone call and he goes, can we pick this up later? And it's like, it was a drill. Yeah, it's a drill. So he's quite charming there. Yeah, exactly. And he's quite. And he's quite charming at this speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

It's a different age of politics. Because then when we see him later in the movie, he gets like booed in that place, in that, in that football stadium. Yeah, they don't like him at all. Why? Like, we don't we don't touch on that at all. Like, why is why is his approval rating so low that he's getting booed in the football like President Fowler, a Democrat. So to bring it into shock, but to bring it into sharp relief with like today today is he sorry, sorry. He's according to wiki. I found a fandom wiki which is making me solve a fucking capture to learn things about Tom Clancy films.

Jesus Christ, slow your roll. He was a Democratic Republican and his successor was Anne Coulter. What Wow. What as predecessor was Gerald Ford as term started January 20th 19 eight years it ended August 1990 successor fucking and cool ladders party was Democratic Republican. OK yeah so the obviously born into an Ohio pig farming family. It all comes back to babe. Oh there we go and this pig's in the city now and and that is a rule in the city. No, it's yeah. So we had so obviously mad Clancy of a shit they had they don't even touch upon in the movie.

Brilliant. Love it. Good, Yeah, good for the good of the film, I think, and for the good of the medium. Jesus Christ. Yeah. So they barely touch on that, but they don't touch on like wise approval rating is so low, like wise, like publicly hated. And you know, if you compare that with like Trump's recent appearance sort of football game when he was trying to like read out that like declaration for like new service members are going to take. It's like an enlistment ceremony thing. They did it 1/2 time at a football show because America like, why don't we just do that on a base like normal people?

But anyway, everyone booed over him because they all hate him because he's a really terrible eyes and like because like every time he opens his mouth, like just shit stumbles out and like he's not funny and he's not like he has got bars. He's not like a pleasant person. He's just being a pure malice. And so like, it's weird to see that happen with James Cromwell. He was like plays quite an avuncular, charming guy. You know, the only thing I can think of is like the comparison would be like George W Bush, but like George W Bush, even when he was in like first pitches at baseball games and stuff, people like that.

But Bush might have been a terrible president, but he was, like, a decent personality hire, you know? Yeah. Like, it's a fun guy. You know, I think about that now. Watch this drive clip. I think about that like, once a month. Yeah. And it's 2026, you know what I mean? I mean, I think it's the reason why they get Donald Trump's, like, dipping on this year's Super Bowl. Like he's like, like, like he's just gonna stay at home and watch like Kid Rock's live performance or whatever it is. Super Bowl half time show.

Yeah, because bunny's going to fucking annihilate him. You say that shit out? Elon Musk asked him, but change his name. A good Bunny. Jesus Christ, man. Like you got big. He's ruled by unserious fucking people. Oh man, Elon Musk the other day, like tweeting or posting on XI. Guess is what he calls it now. Like that. Like money can't buy you happiness. Like, yes, it's the richest man in the world. Like it's good, good. I'm glad it can't. Yeah. Couldn't have happened to like a nicer guy. Like Jesus Christ.

He also posted that I am nothing but insulted on this platform. Good. Good. And I'm glad it's terrible for you. And I'm glad owning it is a miserable experience. Yeah, well, if we know what to say. Right. In a rich man's house, there is no way to spit but his face. Yeah. What's that from again? I think. We said Diogenes. I think it's Diogenes. Diogenes. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Lived in a barrel of that guy, Right. Cool. We've sprayed. But I'm kidding it all in because it was good. Because it's funny.

And it's it's the closest thing because it was a journalist on this podcast. Yeah. Clark tracks the scientists to a former Soviet military facility in Ukraine. Oh, no. Because he. Because he got. Because. So he goes to Russia, first of all, and he goes to that weird hospital. There's just a kind of like Dos house and he goes this old lady who was like the mom with the mom of one of them who's obviously who's obviously dying from like fucking terrible, terrible, bad lungs. And he gives up just a massive, a massive pack of tabs.

And she she, she's like, oh, my son. Oh, he's like tipped me off as to where he is or some shit like that. And then he's like, aha, I'm going to go and check this out. Sweet. So I believe it kind of scopes it out. Yeah. He finds out what's going on. You see them. You see them essentially putting. Don't see him putting it inside the vending machine. A lot of people are blown up by a cigarette machine. Yeah. And it's like, it's like, I see you subtle take a capitalism. And then the narrative takes us to John Clark and Jack Ryan.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get on, get on, Get on a boat. The goodies, Cabbage jobs, Jack runoff to go and do it. It's like, you have to go with him. Yes, you know about it. You have to go with him. He's like, but I'm just an analyst. I'm just an analyst. I just write reports. Classic Jack Ryan stuff. Yeah, Yeah. So he goes. And then. Yeah, he needs someone to ship. Yeah. And they have a bit of a talk about it. And John Clark covets his PDA and he's like Jack Ryan to a little PDA. John covets it. He covers it.

What's that thing to e-mail? And he's, like, zooming in on the maps and school images and stuff, isn't he for, like, where it is? And he. And he kind of passively, aggressively bitches him out a bit for taking a seat at the White House dinner, doesn't he? Yes. Yeah, Right. Yeah. Oh, I was looking forward to going to that one. And then they're on, like, a whiskey or something. They're like a small rib. Yeah. Smashing for the waves. Yeah, good bit of sound design while they have that argument like so how was the correspondence did?

I was looking forward to that thing like like other stuff. Yeah, this great. It's great banter. It really is. Yeah, the pull up, the pull up and like fucking John Clark being an arch undercover operative has a fucking unsuppressed Gucci 1911 with fucking aftermarket hand grips. And then he gives Jack Ryan another unsuppressed 1911 just to use to defend the boat. And it's like you got to screw the can on that thing. Come on, dude. But that's that's again, that's like the very nice DNA of this film in in in in in just in just a few years time.

That would have been like probably an HKUSP with with, you know, like a really big fucking can on the end of it. And like and and and like a few years after that film wise would have had like a little like red dot and stuff on it. But as it is just giving them this incredibly loud fucking noise makeup because, you know, name of miracles, the body and 45 kills the soul horse. God bless. Yeah. So like movies that have to go through that awkward stage where they thought silences actually didn't make them silent and then and then eventually gets the road the other side out now where finally people understand what a science does and how it works and how it sounds.

Yeah. I mean, you gotta remember this is a time in cinema where like you could put a pillow in front of a gun and it would make render it silent. Exactly. That's not quite how that works. That's that's not what the that's what the pillows there for. Yeah. Anyway, So, yeah, they they they raid this facility. They find it's all kind of clear. The scientists have been killed. They've obviously served their purpose. Couple of couple of Ukrainians, Ukrainian soldiers who look at Russian soldiers, but apparently your Ukrainian come and come to them and John Clark is like shoot them.

If I can shoot them, shoot them. Yeah. But luckily Jack Ryan talks him down because he can see Ukrainian, which is good and but it's but it's like this is the thing that came like snagged a bit because like, yeah, like you say like these these guys like the Ukrainian, they've got like, I think like, like what you create Insignia on the Rushankel and stuff. But a second, a significant amount of Ukrainians understand Russian and speak Russian. I mean, it's like logic of bilingual economy, right? So and John Clark, we've seen him speak fluent enough Russian to pass himself off as an actual Russian in that we had like fuck in the hospital.

So it's like the idea that he doesn't. Yeah, that it completely doesn't understand is like, come on. Yeah. It's like unless, unless, you know, John Clark is like pretending to be unable to speak to them in their language, any language they comprehend because he wants to kill them, because he because he yearns for blood. I think that's I think that's probably a very, very generous interpretation. Just another another unanswerable question that this this movie raises along with the president's weird approval ring and what the book of Republican dash Democrat is or Democrats dash Republicans.

It's not in the movie. It's not it's not even in the movie. It's just isn't it? So like, don't worry about it. Are you succeeded when Anne crueled out a real fucking person? What is going on? Don't worry about it. Yeah, it's just don't make. I want to worry about it, mate. Just story about this. No, I'm going to steal all the time. Just can't see, mate. Just story about it. No, no, no, no. I'm worried. It's can't see, mate. Just sorry about it. It's the Gospels of Saint Thomas of Clancy, all right?

It's the courtesies, the ancient texts. So Cabot suspects they are building a nuclear weapon that Russia could use untraceably. Russia and the US relations Australians due to Russia's war in Chechnya. That's still in the movie. Yeah. And that's the topic of rich debate. I think this is the bit where Ryan is like accusing the rest of the United States intelligence operators of being wrong about who's launched that attack. It's like it's a, it's a, he's already been told like it's OK, It's you don't know.

But he's saying like it's a rogue general. It's like, what has you got for that? Don't know, but he didn't say. I don't know. He says like, I know it's just vibes. Like, I'm sure of it. I'm sure this guy I've met once wouldn't have done the thing because I wrote a paper on him. It's like, dude, man, it's not. It's not worth your rate. But I love, I love how like the immediate move is to like put American peacekeepers in Chechnya, by the way. Yeah. And how we're going to get them there. We're going to fly them from Turkey.

Will the Armenians feel cute that anything to get at the Russians? It's like, yeah, amazing. This is good opportunity to talk about. So first of all, I like that they, they don't even discuss whether it's the right thing to do. They immediately are all agreed immediately. Like we're going to put peacekeepers there. Like, yeah, that's, that's not really how a command planning group should go, but fine. And then, and then, then it's just a discussion of like, how isn't it like how we're going to do it?

But this is a good opportunity to talk about the incredible rogue rules gallery of, of that guys, that is the immediate cabinet. So you've got Philip Baker Hall there. You've got Ron Rifkin, who at this time was like an alias. But it's been loads of stuff. Bruce McGill, who we talked about like last time and the time before. Yeah, like, we love Bruce McGill here. He comes back again. Who else you got there? There's one of the Doctor Kelso from Scrubs is there as well. You know what? I just have to say something.

I think I found utterly fucking insane. Fan fan wiki to find this thing out about President foul acts. I found a Jack Ryan wiki that doesn't mention them being a a Democrat dash Republican. I have no idea what insanity I've dug into with this. Weird this weird alternative facts fake news Jack Ryan Wikipedia page says fan pedia thing. I'm sorry that we're going so mad and so fucking rabbit hole here. I think this is AQ and on wiki this is this is this is this is called the Q porn wiki pornos in the the chess piece.

And what's this? This is insane. This is mental. I don't understand this is this is some kind of online game that's been running since 2008. President Fowler is in it and was canonically succeeded by Ann Coulter after ending his career as a Democrat dash Republican president. I don't understand what's going on. There's a feature article saying hello there, do read it. It's taken me to this is weird this is really weird. This is like some this is this is strange. I can't believe I like stumbled on to somebody If we had queued on tape fucking play by play by post online game that's been dead for 15 years.

What the fuck? Yeah, So just to clarify for our listeners. So the unculter thing is that just from this game or is that actually legit that can't see law uncooler thing is from this this we had what appears to be like an online an online player by post kind of game called Q porn. The actual the actual real thing is that he was succeeded by Vice President Darling at the end of his the end of his career, right. And then probably Jack Ryan, right? Yeah, because then Jack Ryan accidentally became president and then became A5 term tyrant.

Cool. Can I continue with the movie now before we get. I don't want to get into this Q and on thing, right? We're already living. Please. It's upsetting me. I've closed the window. It's upsetting. OK, some doom is going a lot these days. And I don't know if you've noticed, on our group chat I'm getting like angry and angry every day.

I hadn't noticed. Right. Ryan and his colleagues discern that a crate from the Ukraine facility was flown to the Canary Islands, then sent to Baltimore on a cargo ship. Ryan warns Cabot he was attending a football game in the city with the US president father that is evacuated before the bomb denies. But the stadium is destroyed and Cabot is mortally wounded. Worsening matters. A corrupt Russian Air Force general hit by Dresler sends warplanes to attack AUS aircraft carrier using the US to believe that Russia pivotrate the nuclear bombing and Fowler orders a nuclear strike on Russia.

So that's quite a lot of stuff. And let's go back to the the blast pretty mega to see a tactical nuke in in the USI mean, it's only in a movie, right? But but it's a pretty it's a pretty pretty pretty evocative image to see like the mushroom cloud over an American city. The the way the whole thing shot is tremendous. It's like you have these just rapid cuts between all of the faces of these people in in the in the stadium. And it's not obviously maybe it felt different in 2000 and two or three in this film was out in cinemas.

But at this point it just feels like it's it's treating the audience brutally. It's treating the viewers brutally because it's surely the smash cut, smash cut, smash cut of all these different faces of people who were about to die horribly, horribly. It reminds me of the it's like 1960s film called Fail Safe, which is about, it's really similar actually. So it's set in like, I guess the war room, right? Yeah. And what's happened is at this time, America's nuclear deterrent against the Soviets was like a constantly up in the air fleet of nuclear bomber planes that was constantly just like refuelling and replenish and and like relieve each other kind of thing.

So like submarines, but but for less time and a lot more work intensive. Anyway, what happens is one of those planes gets like an erroneous order to go and bomb Moscow. And then because of the the measures they have in place, the fail safes, if you like. Yeah, the pilot basically goes, once I got that order, you've got like a grace period of like however long to like recount that order. And if I don't hear it, then that's it. I'm doing the order. Whatever happens, happens to the point where like America is sending other planes to shoot them down and it gets defended by it's like own little battle group.

So that doesn't work. And then they like get in touch with the guy and he just chins him off and says, like protocol says I'm not allowed to take any orders from you. Like I've got I've got the cord. That's it. And it's like the president himself gets on the phone. He's like, well, that voice could be imitated. How do I know it's really the president? Fuck it, not not listening to it. And then eventually they got the guy's wife crying, screaming, throwing up to like call him And and he's like, I don't know if you're my old wife, that's I'm going to do it.

And eventually, like the the president has to call like the Russian premier and explain to him like, look, I'm really sorry. Like we're about to bomb Moscow. I've tried everything I can to stop it. Please don't bomb the America. Like don't do a full scale invasion back to us. Like that's, that's not what we want. We're not trying to do this. And as a show of good faith, I'm going to drop a bomb myself on New York. And then and then like the last shot of the movie is like of rapid montage of a bunch of people just doing their ordinary lives in New York.

Like there's kids playing in in like playgrounds. It's like a shopping vendor. There's people walking down the street. There's like taxi drivers driving cars. Just cuts as the countdown goes down. And then it just ends on like a white screen and that's it. Credits. And it's mega. It's like the serious version of Doctor Strangelove. Shit. Yeah. Wild. So that's what reminded me of like, like when you saw that, like those fast cuts of people was like, oh, yeah, I've seen that before. Yeah. They're not, like, bleak.

It is. It is bleak. And like, the fact that it's not like a lesser film could have zoomed in on, say, a family, I guess that guitar and a son, like, what's going on? No, Dad, I don't know, Billy, just the president's being goofy and running away. We hate him kind of thing or something. I wouldn't have had the same effect as just you are being shown shot after shot after shot of faces of people who are going to be fucking radioactive dust in a few minutes, in a few seconds. And it's it's it's just really good.

And, of course, ushers in an absolute sea change in the film and how how the film's storytelling works and how the film's portrayed, how the production of the film. I'd say production values change, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. To make a comparison, it's probably not fair because they're different. They're different movies with different, different ideas of what they want, what they're trying to do. But like, it compares to like the scenes in like, Independence Day. Yeah. It's not the first time you've brought up Independence Day on this podcast.

Actually, it's not. But but you have the scenes in Independence Day, which again, like a lot of civilians have been killed. But we follow. Is it Vivica A Fox who plays like the Jasmine, who's like the dancer that that Will Smith gets with and how's like the how's the kid? And you get their plight. And obviously, like you have a whole thing with a like they duck into that bridge and like a dog they have with them like jumps into like cover while a big fireball goes behind it. And it's just like, yeah, obviously like big Jerry Brook, kind of a big like, you know, butt Buster.

But like, yeah, very, very cheesy. This isn't cheesy. This is pretty grim. Another thing it does, which I think is pretty cool is you get the scene of it's AUS Marine like helicopter. Yeah, I don't know the Brian. It's not Seahawk I. Think that's a Sea Stallion? Yeah, Sea Stallion. There you go. Big spy, All you guys, they're still in service. It's not Marine One. Yeah, which is the protocol, but but it's obviously like the next best thing that will become really honestly as the president gets on board.

But they do the whole thing of like finding the vehicle that the president was in and rescuing him because he he is like the only point of contact who is authorised at this point to do like what he needs to do. At the same time, I was right. So this is like, I don't want to get into like super deep in the weeds, but I read recently Nuclear war Scenario by Annie Jacobson, which is a really interesting book. It's not perfect. It's really, really interesting book in terms of like a way of teaching you like what the infrastructure for the American handling of like a nuclear conflict, the initial stages of it and what that organisation looks like and like the founding principles of it and the doctrinal kind of bedrock of that.

Really, really interesting in terms of like what would happen in a realistic conflict. Not so much because it's like a one shot bullet of the blue to simplify it. So you can like get into the weeds of, of really dense subjects. They make it the, the start itself pretty simple. But one of the things that happens in that is what would happen in the event of obviously like the nuclear war, who, who's got the power to do stuff about it? And what is the, the initial steps that are taken to safeguard those people.

And there's like a team of U.S. Marines whose sole job it is to like extricate the president from wherever he is and take him to like a bunker for safety to the extent that they will do like nothing else. So like they will run into like a like a developing situation and they will grab the president and run and take him away. The president could be like kicking off the president's family could be there like that. If, if, if the president's family ruined the all at mass of the helicopter. So they can't take off, then they're getting left behind like the president's coming kind of thing.

And they do the same sort of thing for the national security secretary's defence, I think. So again, so it's the, it's the president and it's the highest ranking civilian using control of the military. So yeah, Defence defence secretary or fucking secretary of war now I guess. Oh Jesus, fucking cripe. Secretary of Cringe. Yeah, sexually a cringe big time right here isn't the first size. I read the US National Defence strategy last week. It's obviously like a very high level glossy doctrine publication just to give you like a precious of like what their founding principles are for this current era of of defence spending, procurement, deployment, etcetera.

We do the same thing. Our national or strategic defence review came out like last year, same sort of thing. Ours is a lot longer actually, a lot more detailed. Theirs is like 20 odd pages and I swear to God, like every image in it ball, one image, one painting of George Washington crossing the Potomac and one photograph of two sailors backs to the camera with the US flag drapes during some ceremonial. Every other picture was of like Hex F or Trump or Vance or Hex F Trump hand dance. Like it was not about the troops.

It was not about the material. It was not about the military as a way of showing the nation that you've got this big powerful military and what you're going to do with that around the world. Like it was a completely failed because it was like what military like this, like this. There's no talk about here about like why you're sending stuff or what you're doing with stuff. It's all, it's just like bluster, like we're going to globally mud and ready to like defeat the threats to America by doing football and staying on swimbly and invading, except we're going to invade Venezuela like it's insane anyway.

And it's really fucking funny because that's like photographs of three men who couldn't win a physical fight if they were the last and only three men on the planet. Yeah, yeah, it's ridiculous. I think fans had some, like, reservist time. Hagseth had some reservist time. Trump famously had fucking bone spurs and was the fortunate son who got a fucking Vietnam like like just like Savala to the maximum. Like Hexa, that whole stuff with Hex F and Senator Kelly, like absolutely insane. This jumped up fucking corporal is like Cohen after like one of the most decorated foreign captain.

He's an astronaut who's the fucking husband of Gabby Gifford. Like like like it's fucking insane. JD Vance looks like the fucking Bucky's mascot crossed with Night Man. Yeah. Oh my God. Because they're like the eye shadow. Yeah, God. And the chipmunk. The bookies mask was a chipmunk, Sonia. Oh, my God. Yeah. There's a big famous American chain of service stations. Yeah, actually, I believe it's prouds buses. No, it's not, but I, I I do use with buses in an episode. Who would have thought this would be the one where I got political right.

So yeah, the marines come, they they rescue the president, they take him to the bunker, although they get him onto the actually this is not a real thing. They put him on an aeroplane actually, instead of putting him in a single place. So they can do an in the air like HQ roving HQ where they can continue the battle from or they can put him in a bunker. In this case, they put him in the air. I don't know with his with his cabinet, not all the cabinet would be together by the way, but for this movie they are.

So they're having their whole thing where they're going to go. Who's his with the nuke? Who's it's the nuke. It's got to be Russia. It's got to be Russia. Fill a big hole makes a very good point and it's accurate and true that there are hundreds of nukes that Russia had during this armament that we don't know where they are not unaccounted for. That's still true today. So interesting. And then? Not like the United States is immune to their own broken arrows and arrows where they keep dropping nukes like on their own states on accident and don't find them find them ever again or just lose them in the Mediterranean or somewhere in Europe.

Or Broken Arrow. So if you had got a word for it, yeah. And then the movie. Fun fact while I'm at it. So, as we all know, Germany has agreed to let the United States station nuclear weapons some German soil as part of the NATO nuclear deterrent. Apparently at some point security on the connected air bases was so bad that personnel could order pizza into their office at the place that has the nukes. That's pretty fucking bad. Yeah, so and we're we're trusting these guys with our deterrent. Just give me the nukes.

I'll take better, Kevin. Good grief. Now the movie cuts to Jack Ryan, his perspective. So he's there's that really cool sequence where like the sound is gone and he's like, yeah, discombobulated. And he's. Yeah, because his helicopter was brought down by the by the nuclear blast when he survives it. And just kind of see like the the colour grading of the scene changes a bit. Like it looks a bit great. It looks a bit like greened out, doesn't it? A bit like Fallout 3. Yeah. Makes you wonder if like, that's where that visual language came from.

It's actually a very good call, I think because you can't, because I'm going to speak very carefully and respectfully here for once. But it I don't feel like it was on purpose shot to resemble a lot of the news footage you saw in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 attacks. But I think by fortune or misfortune, it does really kind of like evoke that. And and I think I think there's a high possibility. Yeah. That's that's among other things fed in the visual storytelling that then but saw in Fallout 3 going onwards.

You know, Jack Ryan speaks to Cabot. The Cabot sadly dies. The Cabot is of course the senior board who has the access who could get that measures across to someone who would listen to that. Not that now is gone. So Ryan has now got his big thing. The two things he's worried about now are was the face of Kathy, whose hospital is probably somewhere in the blast radius. Yeah. And how do I get the message to the president and to Nemerov that we know that it wasn't a Russian nuke stand down fucking stand on the SCCP fucking Easter 5 shipmates.

So and he and he starts he texts on with spinnaker for a bit and and have been a crack on and he's like not not not lost stolen the stolen by who you you know, you're still in one bomb, you crazy boss. That's kind of thing while this is happening as well, obviously in the in the US presidents doomsday plane. You've got kind of the scene that's kind of a kind of almost like work with me here, kind of mirror universe dark half reshoot of of the kind of a Thursday war kind of scene earlier in the film when they're in the bunker and being very calm and cool on the top of the destruction from the planet and stuff.

And and you cut this one now when things have changed, a shot in a totally different way, the cameras right in people's faces. People are freaking out, stressing this one guy. I can't open the got up chair, you know, like it's it's like, and that's just really good. That's a great scene. Really good comparison, isn't it? Like from they're all super calm and just reading off all the facts compared to like all panic. And yeah. And now it's like, it's an interesting choice to show essentially the president's war council not being steely when the time came above almost all else.

This one particular sequence when it shows you how it's meant to go at the start of the film, this is how this is how it meant to go when America was in the position of destroying the entire planet in nuclear fire or not doing so. And then it takes it to this place where there's crosstalk and yelling and people are freaking out and unable to operate furniture. And it's like this unpins a lot of the expectations that the previous scene at the start of the film gave you. And I think that's really cool.

I think it's interesting that that President Fowler avoids making a decision on what to do even in the drill by getting off the drill early. Yeah. So it just shows that. And. And even in his best day, he's not prepared to make the call on what to do. He hasn't actually had to, like, deeply, seriously think about it before. And there's another bit which is like tremendous ego is they're arguing on the plane. And he says, this is my presidency. I'm like, mate, it's the face of the whole world. It's, it's it's not your no one's even fucked with your presidency after this.

You're not going to, you won't going to feed your starving mutated children with electoral votes after this, mate. You know, California, 54 electoral votes. My children were born with advanced fucking kidney disease due to massive amounts of radiation. Yeah, wild. Where we at now in the movie, we'll not see America as a retaliation because obviously America has to retaliate and they go for a limited conventional response. F sixteens and smart bombs against the Russian air base. And in a scene that you see this film with all the stuff that it does, right, the footage it uses for, for the Russian planes being destroyed.

If he has to be footage of legacy 130 being blown up in, in like some kind of like firing range, kind of like your kind of footage, like stock footage kind of thing. And it's like, why you do this, man? We've we've we've just seen a load of CGI Russian bombers. I think we're Backfires, but don't quote me on that. And blowing the shit out of CGI American aircraft carrier CGI Sewiz trying to shoot down Sea Dr missiles. And then it's like as an afterthought. As an afterthought. There's just grabs for archive footage for C130 getting blown up.

It's like you've got these, you've got the models of these, like bombers right there on on your computers. You can show some being blown up on the ground. Yeah, that's right. You have the, the, the, the tackle and limits. Yeah, man. Yeah. That's, that's pretty wild. Signing Eve's of opinions about the employment of Sea Wiz in that scenario. So. That's close in weapon system. Sorry for for the civilians listening to us. Sorry guys. It's it's what's an example. Phalanx isn't a good example of a of a weapon system.

Basically what is they put up like a wall of lead. It's a very last ditch of bit of bit of defence for for an aircraft carrier of a large vessels like a high value unit. They are basically mostly barrels, machine guns that fire out like tremendously high rate of fire a large number of of of lead rounds that are called fletching rounds. They come in like a plastic case that flies apart like arrows and they put up a wall of lead basically to to try and defeat. It can be drones nowadays, conventionally missiles and aircraft that are, they're attacking and got through the lid defence system of an aircraft carrier or high value unit.

And by that I mean they've got all the way through the missile engagement zone of all the goalkeeping destroyers and frigates around them. And they've got through the fighter engagement zone fibre out and that of of all the, the, the battle group's own flight of intercepting aircraft. So the very, very last thing before they get in is, is the sea whiz. So yeah, sorry Sonya, go on. So I have, I have opinions on that, that entire bit. Yes. First of all, I mean important prayers. I never have to hear someone yell vampire vampire while I'm in the OPS room because I haven't made my will yet.

Secondly, I am. I didn't quite pick it up yesterday but and might have still been goalkeeper Phalanx which is the. Goalkeeper on on the in the movie, yeah. Yeah, which which goalkeeper is a Dutch sea witch system which has actually one large advantage over Phalanx, which is it has a deck penetrating magazine. So you can actually just swap it out instead of spinning 45 minutes loading all 30 seconds of ammunition in one thing in this sequence, which is probably just done for dramatic effect. But it has irked me immensely to have the, the fighter bombers launching the missiles in visual range of the carrier.

And that proximity if, if you like, I think at that point the, the, you're well within the, the tiniest lethality bubble surrounding that that ship. And at that point, goalkeeper was that goalkeeper wouldn't open up on the missiles, it would open up on the planes, right? Like people, people tend to forget now about fighter jets are actually humongous. Like Russian fighter jets on average have roughly the same size as World War 2 Lancaster bomber. So I think there is a solid chance that all those systems might have pinged those planes way early and just shot down the planes, yeah.

It would have done. It would have shot down the plane and then and then the next biggest trinkular plane and the next biggest trinkular plane after that until. I think at that range the the ship might have just been hit with debris anyway, even if they had shot down something was if you, if you like, I don't know, a supersonic sledgehammer isn't just going to completely disintegrate in that range and fall in the water. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the whole thing's, the whole thing's fucked up. So I've, I was really looked and it appears to be what NATO called ES-4 kitchens and the KH22 storm missile, which has a range of 600 kilometres.

So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The the standard anti ship missile during the Cold War was actually based on entire fighter jet hull fitted with explosives at the front. That height there flying as well. There's not really a chance they're getting away undetected either. It's either you would launch way further away at a higher altitude or if you get not close you would try to go for a sea skimming or a pop up attack and you wouldn't just fly there like well within radar heights and come not close without being.

Detected. Yeah. Like like they haven't learned any lessons from the Falklands, which is yeah, that's pretty well. So yeah, even even the even the Argentinians had a better tactics. They they obviously did the public attack as a as a sort of standard operating procedure when they were find that ennards during the during the Falklands. The other thing that's messed up about this is that this US carrier wild Russia's on a war footing with Chechnya. This US carrier is operating in the North Sea on its own isn't part of a battle group or what we now call a carrier strike group.

So that layer defence I talked about isn't there. It's all. Just doing its own thing. Yeah, which is is pretty, pretty, pretty rare, I mean. That's on. With with with an American city getting naked, I'd imagine every American Africa carrier is putting up a combat air patrol. Every American aircraft carrier has got airborne early warning up right. I mean, that's I mean that that would that would that would happen. I imagine like there wouldn't be just like chilling out in the dark that I've that I've that have the lights on, you know.

Yeah. It also wouldn't be on its own if it would be there with like, you know, a fleet of Harley Burks or or Taekwondo Rogers, you know. Yeah. Or if it was a NATO type thing, that'd be a mixture of of like a NATO battle group with that at the centre of it kind of thing. It wouldn't be on its own kind of out in the North Sea. That's just, that's just unrealistic. So the fact they can do like a proportional attack by shitting that shooting that one ship is, is pretty, pretty wild. If Russia wanted to do a proportional attack by shooting one Russian, one US aircraft carrier, they'd have to find one that's like a long size by chance in like a NATO country to to kind of send the message.

But then that would violate the territorials of that country. I'm just imagining double sixes to find the situation. I'm really sorry. I'm just imagining them flying like all the way to Pearl Harbour now all of a sudden engagements with Russia travelled a really, really long way and then got absolutely summarily roundedly beaten. If you talk about the the the the Russia Japanese war in the Battle of Tashima in 19 O 8 where they sailed their entire fleet around Africa to go to Japan and then rocked up to Japan and got absolutely annihilated because their feet fell apart on the way.

Would you? Would you like the? Engagement of Northumbrian fishermen as well. And they? Started shooting each other as well. They thought the Russians were the the Japanese were in the channel for some reason. Yeah. But I think the only realistic thing of that scene is like the missiles going for the superstructure of the ship. It's like it went for the biggest Raiders signature. Not like it, but yeah, where where's the where's the battle group? Why is the the distance so short? We are defcon three.

Why is everyone like basically with our pants down? Yeah, it's, it's crazy. Yeah, exactly. Where the hell are those planes coming from? Undetected. Yeah, fly over half of NATO. Yeah. It's like, Oh yes, the Russian airport of Hamburg. Don't fucking manifest that Sonia. That. That sounded too plausible. We have seen how good the Russians are taking airports in their 1 1/2 thousand days special operation currently going on. Look what they're done like they're launching real quick. Go long aside into the the nuttiness of that that naval engagement.

The movie's Neddy over. So Jack Ryan makes his ways. The National Military Command Centre in the Pentagon are holding Cabot's credentials and gets in. There's a tense movement where he doesn't really get in and the security guards about is about ready to put runs down. But then but then the the key card works and and and because you're always like oh OK, cool, yeah, come on. And then I won't bother looking at it even though clearly you're fucked up anyway. Yeah, he gets in manages to get get himself manages to make an argument with what is it?

Is it a is it a Squadron Leader or something? There's AUS Air Force guy in charge of the room where the crypto is for the, well, telex system. Yeah, it's someone who's vaguely, vaguely high up in the US Air Force. But before this, we've missed out how the Russians and Americans are communicating via take out messages and stuff. And the Russian President, after seeing the attack, has got his team to write a kind of like a draft a response. So, you know, shit, really worried kind of thing, you know, wasn't US homie kind of thing.

And then when it's sent through was a response to the Americans so quickly, it's like, that's canned. That's canned. They were ready for this. It's like, oh, man, those, those really bad timing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, yeah. So who, who, whomst among us doesn't draft a message first before they pop it into chat. But, yeah, you know, like in a professional situation. But italic system they've got apparently transmits every single keystroke it seems. I just send people emojis and Jay chat. I have done that today.

But but did you do it intentional? This under laughing emoji. Uh, quite seriously today. Can you imagine the ship being done of a Microsoft Teams though? Like it totally would take away like the gravity of the situation wouldn't. It Yes. Imagine watching this film. Baltimore has just been naked, every American plane is on its way to Moscow, and suddenly you're hit with the Ms Team's calling sound. Yeah, and the number was like, I'm sharing my screen. Can you see my screen? You're muted, Tavarish.

You're muted. Oh, apologies, apologies. I am double muted. I was double muted. I didn't realise. Doctor Ryan. Can you see me? Recall recalling the president's fucked up. And he said I felt that. But he's like, I'm not a cat. I'm not a cat, I'm not a cat. And he's like and and like that Rob's like kids go. And then the presidents, like, can you tell Ryan to stop sharing his screen now? It was, it was like, Ryan, your your hands up. Did you mean to put your hands up? Oh no, I meant to send a reaction.

Mr Secretary, I think your mic is still on. One of them's what one of them's doing that really fuck ass thing of having like a stupid like fucking tropical beach background, you know, and it's like, you have like a serious meal about things and, and like some, some dude like 1 of Namorov's aids just kind of tunes in and it's got some like ridiculous fucking tropical beach background. And it's like, and it's just like kind of contrasting with the fact that he's he's got the facial expression of a man whose country is about to get glassed.

There was one person who's like hasn't set their picture to be like a professional image of them. And it's just like a an emoji or like something Gorge got. Why? Why which one? Which one of you is is the minion? Why one of you a minion? Good fucking grief. The the head of the Russian Air Force just has himself set as a background and isn't even on the meeting. So yeah, Jack Ryan starts getting involved in the, in the messages, he obviously lays out what he knows to try and talk them both down. He's hijacked the, the thing he's managed to convince that room full of like Air Force people and stuff that he's allowed to do what he's doing.

And they agree with him that, you know, cooler heads, he prevails. So he's they've got him on side, but all the while they're trying to cut him off. But he he fights to to keep, keep talking and he gets the gets the message out. And just when you think it's all fucked because he's been cut off, Nemerov agrees to to back off his missiles because he's got them in an arming sequence. And then he proposes like a 5 hour staged de escalation and the day is saved, which is fantastic. So that's that's that.

And then we enter the plot of some of All Fears, the 2002 Red Storm Entertainment video game. Yes. Where, where we got just one of the most cathartic sequences in cinema, where all the bastards who are behind all this get killed by a variety of assassins from Russia and America. They get theirs and it's beautiful. It's so good. It starts with John Clark grotting that the arms deal. I know. Yes, it's his fucking throat. He slits his throat. That's straight blade. And like, it's sick. It is literally.

But yeah, maybe the best fucking use of Pavarotti I've seen in the film in some time, Right? Yes, yes. Incredible. That's some out while a lot of white supremacists get raised. It's dopamine. It's fantastic, just so good. Yes, Oh, they're all shot slightly different. So you've got like the like it's it's a bit yellow tinted somewhere hot. And then the John Clark like sits I guess through and then it cuts to like another guy who's like stumbling through the snow and in the woods. That's the Russian Air Force commander who who tricked his tricked his dudes in a thing in Moscow would be naked and sent them off to to sing in the carrier.

That's right. The, oh, the US Navy, by the way, stipulated that you can't have that because in the script originally that ship was going to sunk and like, and they're like, you can't sink off ship. We draw the line at that. We don't want, we don't want to prepare the idea that our ships are so easily sunk Anyway. Yeah, see, I see him get taken out. Those two guys standing over him like empty their magazines into him. Very satisfying as well. And then the last one is, is Dressler, who he sends a guy out.

Oh, I love this. Sends a guy out to start his car for him and the car starts and it's like, oh, right, OK, so it's not a car bomb. Cool. And he sits in the car. And because earlier on in the movie when he was having a meeting with his cabal of horrible Nazis, he he jokes, oh, do you have a cigarette? Those things will kill you. And he and he take and he takes 1. He plugs in the cigarette lighter and the cigarette lighter is what dead into the car. Cigarettes killed him in the end. Brilliant coffin nails baby cowboy killers.

So good. And then we get, while that's happening, intricate with that, we have like the signing of the peace treaty between Russia and America and probably like a favourite escalation of arms treaty. And then it cuts to like a little park just just away from the White House where Jack Ryan is having a picnic with Kathy, watching a little portable television they brought with them. Do you remember those? They were a thing. And then who should wander up to speak to him? The only the man who helped him all this time, spinnaker Michael Byrne.

And it's just like, man. And then they have that like that, that bit of dialogue where it's like, you know, to keep the back channels open to prevent disaster, the last moment kind of thing. And he's like, and and he has a present to celebrate your engagement. And he's like, oh, my God, he only asked her to marry me this morning. And he's like, yeah, well, come on. All the shit you've seen, dudes. I am pretty aware of how things work on this planet, my friend. I am a have a great marriage. Yeah.

Oh yeah, so he's also watching when Dressler's car explodes as well. For my yeah, it's really good. Cold, cold as fuck. Yeah, cool. The moment earlier in the film when when he offers just to shoot that rogue general who bombed church. Now he's like, should I shoot him or whatever? He's like, yeah, base he's, but it's cast because he's because because he's shown his old school brutal, the Soviet school of intelligence and counterintelligence. But he's a good fucking guy. And and he's and he's on the side of right, which happens to be America and Russia being buddies, which was kind of, it was kind of all the time.

Obviously this is like, it was, it was, it was, it was novel. Yeah. Kind of naive, a little bit naive. Yeah, 2002. So we are firmly back in the Putin era, aren't we? Yeah, so we had a little respite between Gorbachev and Yeltsin and stuff, but yeah, the old man's back again. Yeah. We had that weird era, didn't we? Like we used to. We used to do NATO, used to do military exercises together with Russia at that point. Yeah, yeah, Boris Elton was just like a fun guy. Just a man. Just an innocent man.

Just a guy just like get tanked up and Just Dance around the place and appear on television drunk. Like. He was a pub guy. He was a pub man, wasn't he? He was like. We trained naval landings in the Baltics together with the Russians. Like, what were they? What were we thinking? Crazy isn't it? And now they are again, number one threat again. Yeah. Cool. So, yeah, that's that's the movie. Should we take a short break? And then, Rory, you're going to take us through some categories.

All right, welcome back to Clear and Present dudes. And we're going into the categories now. So working off the same kind of category structure I've been doing, the previous seat might have thrown some other stuff in there to to visit up a bit and make it a bit crazier. Let's start with a good old staple. Let's go for the casting. So the the first, the first person credited in this film is Ian Mongrain, who's a Syrian radar operator. That's his credit and he's only got 1 acting role on ACV which is this film.

Everything else on his IMDPDBPHDP. There's probably an IMDP but it's probably really fucked up with the film. Database page is like technical stuff. Data manager, Data Wrangler, data technician who works data manager on Transformers. Rise the beast. Lab tech for dailies on Moonfall. Data management for Midway. Midway mentioned Midway mentioned. That's a real movie that exists. That's a real movie that exists. We've all data management tech for what was that, Sonya? We've all seen films. That's that's that's the sort of category Midway falls into.

Of course we've. More than once my old boss loves Midway and I was like, really see if you've seen other films, you know they're they don't all like this. Getting a lot of Midway vibes from this one guy who's only seen Midway. Midway vibes of this movie. You watch. You watch this settles on to watch Matt Damon's The Wall. Getting a little midway vibes from this movie. What a weird Chinese Co production Vias from this movie, Yeah. Putting the mid in midway. Opposing nice. Patrick Wilson deserves much more than that movie.

That's not how I wonder. Sorry, man. Bars. No, I didn't apologise. That was that was some bars from Sanya the putting the putting the mid in midway. I love that. Right. Yeah, Ian, Ian Bond grade. This is this is this is not of granularity for a guy who plays a radar operator just for some reason after doing loads of tech shit on other films. I don't know why he did it. I don't know why he got the role. I couldn't find anything about it on the Internet. I mean, I got a role in the film just by being a cool friend and a nice guy you'd be with.

So it happens sometimes. This guy's done real shit. He also worked on the the Jack Ryan TV shows, the data management tech showing that everything comes back to to Tommy C. He worked as data management again for sure called fubar age of computer, which just sounds like the best title ever and it's also credited as Yan Mon grain as a digital image tech for the same sure. Who is this guy? This guy is This guy has mysteries about him. He loves data. Maybe that's why they made him Radar operate him, because it's just so good at sitting at consoles and pushing buttons and turning little wheels.

The song do exactly that and the like. Do it and we'll give you a fibre. And the like, boy, you've, I got a rule for you. Just sit right there. How would you like to just stay where you are right now and we shove a camera into your face? That's amazing. I love it. We've mentioned before John Clark, played by Lev Schreiber. Lev Schreiber. Younger, more urbane more restrained still with a significant amount of sinister aura about himself than than the previous movie John Clark massive for Ray Donovan assure that I recall being huge but it's a total cultural blind swap for me.

I've never seen it. I don't even know really what the Showtime TV show so tell me

my mum got really into it. It's one of them ones, like blue bloods, like nothing. Yeah, yeah. Continue to kind of do some thriller Maxing after his turn in some of All Fears. He played a Raymond Shaw and the Manchurian Candidates remake. He played Sigmund Freud between those two films. He's recently been in the Splinter Cell Deathwatch series playing Sam Fisher. Another. I didn't most know that was a thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's animated. Yeah. Yeah, it's animated. He's playing Sam Fisher. So once again, everything comes back to Clancy.

It's crazy, man. He also played a Copernicus and. And from Morphic Cat, who led a cult of improv actors and Bojack Horseman. Oh, that's him, Yes. And yeah, but the big fucking cat dude, he was like, oh, I love that guy. Well, my yeah, yeah, on, on, on, on, on the board on that like Philly on on that Philly disguised Scientology proxy C org thing. The hard when he's like, oh, you see my cabins just like the rest of yours. With the power of imagination, it could be filled with jewels, gold, and then it's actually a door through a room that literally is filled with jewels and gold.

It's like fuck you Copernicus yes and no. But Richard Mara we've talked about already known the British TV heads and enjoyers of his dad quote of comedies as Colonel Von Strom from Alu Alu perfect. Sure it looks like he he actually came out of retirement for this film. It looks like it he may have been doing all that stuff between as penultimate appearance seeing the guest role in an episode of Lovejoy in 1994. But whatever he was doing, it wasn't acting in films and TV. Then he came back to just spectacularly die after telling people that he's fit as a lot.

Mate. I wouldn't strong totally fine. I wouldn't if he was like a good stage actor. I got I get stage vibes from. I bet he was that he was out there stage maxim. I bet he was one second. I would just Lee Darlington, who played Mary Pat Foley, the line manager of Jack Ryan, the one who you see in the office at the start of the film. And then again, just giving him some advice later on. Just giving a really great, heavily pregnant and not having time for bullshit kind of vibe to the role. I'm the big fan of Mary Pat Foley in the books.

I think she's a total fucking badass. I think she's brilliant. I love her kind of development from being kind of barrassed like kind of field operative and corner of the Kremlin going all the way to like being incredibly high up in the CIA in in the Baron the Dragon. And she is an absolute that gal for for things she's been in. She's done a significant amount of guest work. She has 234 credits as as as an actor on IMDb. It is wild stuff going strong out for a long career. The most recent thing was in was ATV movie called Oh no not them.

She had a guest spot an episode of The Good Doctor in 2022. I am a surgeon. Live hard reaction doctor hard. Can you can you Can you imagine him him getting disciplined by Mary Pat Foley? If like in instead of like a doctor, he was like a say officer and he's like I have a spy a very part. I am a spy. Just fuck off. She's done. I mean, she's been working since like 80s. She she's been like big parts in films like Cobra. She's been in like loads of like one off one shots and things like shows episode, Quantum Leap Blossom, stuff like that.

She's done loads and loads of character actor stuff. Wings, she's done like everything basically. She's done horror stuff to like just ridiculous sitcoms drama. She's incredibly, incredibly, it seems flexible and versatile and I do love when a film has an absolute that guy slash that gal in it. She's Beulah in Field of Dreams. Yes, she's in sneakers as well. Exactly. So that's the connection to the director because obviously Field of Dreams sneakers plays plays Natalie's moment American Pie too.

You could just literally like, I'm just going to scroll the screen and pick a random thing here. Moving on. We have got a course Kieran Hines as number of it's seen like a lot of reviews that people are seeing on once again, it's like a non Russian playing Russian President. And it's like, yeah, fair enough, actually. But I mean at that point I don't think they had like a big like talent pool. Look at kind of digging, you know, when like you're making like when you're making like a film with like Ben Affleck and Morgan Freeman and the guy from Babe is like the encounters was really any kind of Russian equivalent of them working in Western film?

Probably not. I mean Richard Marner was actually born in Russia. His family like dipped in the 1920s. So so he did have one actually Russian born president briefly before he announced his level of fitness was was over 9000 and he then he died. Kieran Hines again, what an absolute performer. I was a big fan of him in the English. Such a fucking good show. And of course, in the terror, he's he's unbeatable as Cat is as John. John Franklin in the terror, Russia. Max's in Hitman Agent 47 as Litvenko.

Which one is that? Is that the Rupert Friend Hitman or the the other one? It's the one that came out in 2015, if that helps at all. It's got five stars on IMDb. Not yeah, yeah, the real friend one, not the Timmy Fall different one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and of course, he was in. He was in John Carter, a film that my wife is Adam and Cher hasn't seen even though I've watched it with her. That's great. Which is great because Wins got to watch it again, and it's great. I don't know why. I don't know why people sleep on that movie.

It's really good. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. My theory is that Disney didn't know how to promote it properly, so they just didn't bother. And it didn't embed itself enough in the zeitgeist for people to be like, this is good. Actually. It was definitely one of those movies that when it came out, it was like you'd see its name on a bus. Yeah. And like for me, that's like the lowest hanging fruit for for film promotion. It's like, oh, if you see it on the side of a bus, it's either the biggest film of the year or it's a big part of shit.

And there's no there's nothing. There's nothing in the middle. Yeah, definitely. Q Haynes was also in a short film called Glock, in which she played a character called Luga. What was his best film called? Browning, He. And time. He paused, like, around the time. I love it. The thriller maxed in Miami fights in 2006, Munich in 2005 is a guy who has just got an excellent, like, range of leading man kind of stuff. He was a fucking soldier. Soldier for one episode. The English drama that loved torturing squaddies.

Yeah. God, what's agreement? Rob's it in Jerome. Rob's it in Jerome. Up on the roof, man. Yeah, we hope you'll probably know him best as from Game of Thrones, right As yeah, Yeah. Mans Raider, the. Yeah. Yeah. Leader of the Wildling folk. Yeah. He was in Excalibur. Oh, that must be like his first movie or something. It's like Neeson was in it as well, and so was Patrick Stewart. They all played like Knights, but they were all like in. It's like a scene. Yeah. Looking on and moving on from our excellent number of.

Yeah. Alan Bates, Bruden Sinister. Absolutely acid re as the evil Austrian white supremacist. She was given his like fantastic villain monologue to the to his webcam as we see the sake cut of the nuclear weapon being brought into America and stuff. And it's like he's believably horrible. He's he's outlandish and he's flamboyant. He's also believably horrible in this role. This was I think maybe his second or third last film as well. I don't think he worked a lot after this. He he was in a film called Evelyn, that ATV movie called Salem witch trials, a film called meanwhile, Hollywood N the statement as Spartacus in the TV series.

It was 2 episodes of that in 2004 and that was the last thing he did. But he's just obviously a guy with with an incredible, incredible story history. Zorba the Greek, of course, battle Zorba the Greek classic. That's such a good film. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he kind of he he sort of brings that like kind of deep resonant gravitas, drama, actor performance to a thriller. And maybe that's something that really kind of sets, sets the character and the performance apart a little bit, which I thought was pretty cool.

It's about two years in the RAF, which is like the military equipment of the gap year. Oh, damn, son. World star Real Olga and Gilles Marsali, the guys who killed Dubinin at the end, or actual Canadian police officers from Quebec. That's fun. Who? I did a bit of reading up. I don't know how they got into the film. I don't know what the story is. I don't even want to assume. But yeah, so they're actual, they're actually local police who just did a guest star. Evan. Guest rule credited and just shot the fuck out of Dubinan in the woods in the snow.

Credited as Marine rescuer Masa Sergeant David Vasquez appears to be a really U.S. Marine who then has tonnes to war work. You want to win a war, tell it in the Marines. You want to make a movie, tell it to the Marines. I think. Yeah. Question the floor. Bridget Moynahan's Cafe. How do we rate her as holding up against the other cafes? Ryan. It's weird, isn't it? We we didn't get to see where it would go. Yeah franchise from from the reboot right. So like the original Kathy Ryan is Kate McFadden, Dr Doctor Beverly Crusher.

Yeah doing a faking accent right yeah, discount with her She was rubbish. I am sorry, Bull World star. Our main Kathy Ryan for me, an Archer is is the Kathy Ryan. OK, right, Because she was in two of the movies, which makes a like double the cover Ryan that all of us have done. And and she is like age appropriate, I guess for for Jack Ryan in the movie. They have like they have their kids. They've got their two kids. She's got her career as a doctor. She's well established. The person we're meeting at this stage is Kathy Muller.

I guess is I'll tell you what the best comp is probably not Keira Knightley in shuttle recruit, but the Kathy Muller from the TV show. Yeah, I found them quite similar. Yeah. And like, like kind of on at the same level. I got the impression from the TV show on that that she she came from like a position of privilege. She's already from like, quite an influential family. Yeah. Because remember, he, he rocks up to that like massive garden pie that her dad's throw. Her dad's like wealthy and glad handed around Washington and stuff and and and and and and then the extractor with the fucking Black Hawk.

And he's like, I don't work for the State Department. Now that's a reveal. Yeah. That's a perfect pie. Yeah, I like her. I don't dislike her. Yeah, I feel like Richard Moynihan has been maybe slept on a little bit. I don't know what she was like to work with or anything. I don't know. I've not seen her have too much range. Obviously, I don't. You don't see her in too much. You're sharing this. You're sharing John Wick for all movies. You've seen her in Kate Ugly. I've not seen her in, like, too much of her stuff.

I feel like there's potential here that she could have been really, really good. I just, I wonder which actress kind of market corrected her out of out of the rules that she's got. Is it is it Megan Fox? Maybe the seen her off around this kind of time like she was in Lord of War. Actually, she was my robot. But Los Angeles. So she's good. Yeah, I like her. I don't dislike her. How about that? Yeah, how about that? She's not my Jack Ryan. But then neither is Ben Affleck is my he's not my Jack Ryan either.

So is he your Batman, though? Like get real.

Adam West or nobody Adam West or nobody W is best. West is best. Which Kevin? Yeah, Kevin, Kevin Conroy and and Batman Muscular Phantasm is clearly the best Batman. That's yeah, only half joking about that. Yeah. But yeah, going on, I've got, of course, Bruce McGill mentioned already, Bruce Mack and absolutely. Yes, an absolute he's going to appear on so many films do obviously he's going to appear on a lot of stuff for do because this guy seems to have, you know, when someone looks like the should be in thriller films, that's clearly him.

And I mean, obviously he's he's he's in he's in collateral. I mean, Michael Mad Maxis, doesn't he? So like we talked about he's he's not much we talked about recently. Yes. Law buying citizen. My cousin Vinnie is the cop in my cousin Vinnie. Oh, man, Great. He's so in terms of thriller stuff recently I mentioned Richard. He's in that Black Ops Lionesses thing that's in Paramount. Yeah, yeah, I saw that just now. Like he's in Lioness. Fucking hell. Yeah. Well, he's in, he's he's he's in Vantage Point, which is a film that I'd actually really like us to do at some point.

So I don't know if I've added this. Well, big master list of films. He's he's in. Oh my God, he was in. He he did voice work for Mercenaries. Playground of Destruction. Is that the second one or the first one? Oh, I don't know. That's the first one. That's the first one. Wow. Yeah. That's so good. Runaway Jewellery. That's a good movie Yeah. Yeah. Wow. There's a lot of because Sophia Ali so Michael Mann maxing again yeah, there we go Legend of bag advance. Not nice. Robert Rifford's best film. Yeah.

Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. The game. I think fucking hell yes it is. Now we're going to go to the the VHS and the mess test. A question in which I, the civilian of the team, the guy that the boys won in a card game, asks them, would this film show up well in ships mess officers mess or or wardroom or whatever, or barracks stuck on a VHS in consultation? Would this be enjoyed by the ships company or the the service personnel of the unit or whatever? Would this go down well? And why do you want to go first, Sonia?

No, do you you, you go, sorry. Don't go fucking rush it once yes, I think it's a resounding yes for me, right. It's got it all it's got. It's got a bit of clacker there in in terms of Bridget Moynahan, that's enjoyable. They've got some fun bands. You've got the absolute sea off merchant that is Will Cabot, very funny. Good stuff. You've got you've got leaf Shubers in the wet work stuff and some good good. You've got some good gun fights. You've got, you've got the sequence with the sea whiz and The Jets that we're going to rinse and and take the piss out of in the wardroom.

So that's good. That's enjoyable. Yeah. Young, young Ben Affleck just just being all young, dumb and full of love for his country. Great, great stuff. Yeah. I yeah, we're definitely paying the rest. It's not too weird. It's it's not sort of super, super rules. It's bang on, almost perfect. If that film had been made in 2009, for example, maybe that would have shipped it over and and made it a constant rotation. But 2002, not too bad. Yeah. Cool, Sonia. Yeah, not, not really. I think my main talking point would have been rinsing that attack scene as well, I think.

However, I mean, do does your wardroom still really get together and watch films? Yeah, on deployment, not so much on like, you know, the UK running kind of stuff, but if you're like at sea for a prolonged period, yeah, big time. Yeah, it's, it's getting, it's getting a bit rare over here, sadly, because if we've all in the last few years tapped heavily into, into getting stalling to everyone so people can stay in touch with their family and everything, which is, which is obviously fine, but a real detriment to, to wardroom culture.

Doing this movie. Nice. I suppose anything that happens as well though. Is that Brazon? I just want to 3 deployments in Cardigan Bay. I think one of them is a deployed battle stuff, the other two is an embarked military force on there. I was showing a cabin with like an opposite number like the whole time. So if we weren't in the wardroom watching like movies, we'd like have a laptop and we'd watch stuff together in there. And there's ATV on board as well, which was collected into like a standard UK channel like BFBS and like the usuals.

So on one on the road to Christmas, we watch like a Channel 5 Christmas movie every single day for like 2 months. So we watched like at least one, probably probably 2. I watched something around 100 Christmas films of like the Hallmark variety, kind of stuff like a very UK, a very British Christmas and like a A Wish for Christmas and and Christmas Wish, two different films and that kind of thing. So we did a lot of that. We also watched on one of my deployments, we watched the entirety of Star Trek The Next Generation.

We watched the film we did we're going to do next week. Yeah, Sicario ones, Yeah, we used to just watch movies with Reckless Abandoned and one puppy watched All the President's Men, which was a weird pull for two guys alone in a room to watch. But yeah, it happens. So yeah, if it's not the wardroom, it's it's somewhere else. I guess the the real challenge nowadays is that a lot of people get single accommodation doing they the big mess deck is thing is, is not so much a thing anymore. But let's say on the forward mess of a hunt, you still got like a whole bunch of juniorates in there.

Are they going to watch this movie? Maybe, I guess. I guess I don't know if it's the same for the German Navy. Broadly speaking in in the Royal Navy, the junior rates are pretty young. They're like they're like sort of 18 to 25. And then and then the senior rates and officers are a bit older. The junior officers are like in their maybe mid 20s to 30s. People like myself obviously gusting 40 this year, bad times. And the senior rates again, mid 30s to 40s. And I think we're the people who who will watch it.

So yeah, that's the only me that definitely. The question is, will the kids still watch this? Because it's at this point it's older than the kids. It's. Weird. Is that because? Because Ben Affleck is still, isn't he? Yeah, but, but, but on the other hand, it's it's there's a fair chance it's not fast-paced enough for for the young UNS to enjoy it. Really, Well, this goes back to what I was saying at the beginning. This is like a 90s movie still, isn't it? Now some 90s movies, because they are from the 90s, I think still get like a lot of play.

Like I think you could still, you could plunk Armageddon on and I think those kids would be like, oh, I watched this when I was tiny, tiny, tiny and and like it. There's some stuff. Hey kids, this film is as old as me. Hey people, were there cars when you were younger? Well, yeah, man, this is the weird thing. So like, this movie came out and I was 16. I looked at this, I was working at A at a garden centre and Bruce Springsteen's The Rising was just about to come out. I remember this like it was yesterday.

So if I was 16, Rory used to have been like 1819. Yeah, I am broadly in agreement that that that this film would definitely go down well in the wardroom of the ship that I'm not on a great moving on to some rapid fire. One have mentioned he is spin off surprise one of the characters from this film. You've got to fucking pitch me a spin off TV series for them right now and what's it going to be? And it can't be Jack Ryan. Give me a second. Yeah, spin off TV series right. OK, spin that shit off. It can be any kind of channel acting like one of the streamers like Netflix or Amazon or what time is it rightnow.com, or it can be or or make a low budget shit thing on Channel 5.

It can be ITV, whatever. OK, I'm just picking a good person for this. I'm sorry. The one I'm going to go with is it's going to be on one of the big streamers fully. It's a show about Mary Pat Foley, as she is at the time of this pregnant and sick of people shit, which also has multiple flashbacks to when she was working as a field agent in Moscow during the whole cardinal the Tremlin kind of thing. And she's she's she's she's like hunting down secrets and like final, final and loose ends from a period in Moscow in the 80s and Spinnaker as a guest star on us multiple times, all connected.

Oh, that's really cool, right. That would actually go hard bang, right. That's so good. Yeah. OK, right. I'm going to pitch you a Comedy Central multi camera workplace comedy. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Workplace comedy. OK, set. It's going to be called God, What's it going to be called? I don't know. Must go. And it's going to be based and it's and it's set on the Russia desk in in the CIA or it'll just be called just be called like a lack of intelligence or something. And and it's around it's based around Dil gold bulldoze character Rudy, who's like his guy for the dreads who works in the office.

Yeah, Rudy. Yeah. And it's going to be basically like pop pop from community and, and all the funny stuff they go along with. And then like Mary, Mary Pat Foley is like the, the Michael Scott of the office, right? And, and Dale Gabaldo is like, he's going to be like the Dwight. And then, and then, and then Jack Ryan is like the Jim Halpert and he's played by John Krasinski. Yes, I I love, I love that you've got John John John Krasinski playing Jack Ryan again, Fucking amazed. I love Central Fun Intelligence Span Central Fun Intelligence Crowdfund 4 on Comedy Central.

Fucking love it, Sandy, if you've got a pitch for us. So either as like Prime Video thriller ish spin off just on spinnaker doing his thing in Moscow, which could like turn increasingly paranoid towards the end, or you could just get really weird and and do a sort of government trying to re establish Baltimore thing. Yeah, holy shots. Really. Fucking it's like it's sort of sort of government agency construction vibe. Baltimore. We we've got A and and like the the season finale of of like after three seasons is just another football match happening where the old stadium used to be.

It's written by David Simon. Yes, of course. Amazing scenes. Yeah. And it's all about like, local business owners is trying to pick up the pieces and we follow one guy string a bell. That's actually Simon. Pegg as the distraught mayor of Baltimore. That's actually fucking really good stunt cast in there. I dig that. That's fucking brilliant, man. That's excellent. I love that shit. Aiden Gillen. Wow, That was. Yeah. Thank you lads, for kind of humouring my random surprising out of left field category there.

I had another idea. Yeah. Which is it's a right. This is a bit experimental. It's a silent comedy about John Clark. And every day John Clark gets up and travels into his office to do his desk job. And then he gets caught on like a Mr. Bean style wacky adventure, which involves him to murder several people before and then trying to get on with his day. That's amazing. That's so freaking good. He's just like, and like, leave. Sharifa is probably mugging into the camera like, like a like, like a black and black.

And he's like comedy kind of thing. And he's like Mr. Bean. So he can do like, he can like, make the odd noise, but he can't like. Yeah, and he's and he's just like, stop, what the fuck out with someone? And then like the body, like the body starts pleasing. He's like, oh, no. And he's forcing her in the blood. And he's like trying to clean the body and like the body. He's putting the bed in the chair. He keeps slumping in the chair. He puts the back of the chair and it slumps in the chair. Yeah.

And then Bill Capitals comes and it takes his fucking wallet off him and walks out. He's like the boss. He's like the boss. He's like, let's go to the oversell of the military industrial complex. Which part of this film had the grandest, grossest, most ridiculous, ludicrous oversell of the MIC of how millery shit that espionage shit in general works? I think for me it's on the evening of the blast in Baltimore. While the initial damage assessment is probably still happening, the initial like military aid to civilian authorities to like open streets and put out fires and find survivors and all that kind of stuff is happening.

There's guys working in a tent pretty much like adjacent to Ground Zero talking to talking to Jack Ryan saying we've determined exactly which which bit of uranium this is that set off this bomb and it's made in America. I I think I think that's ridiculous. Like that would happen. I mean, do me wrong. People would be put a task on it, but it's not pro. It's not proxy one in the city of Baltimore at the time. Yeah. I mean, it's like weeks to months, right. I'd say weeks to months before the figure that out kind of thing, you know, feels like it.

Yeah, it feels yeah. It feels like the inquiry into it. I mean, the military response to it is the bigger kind of quandary they're dealing with right now. And they haven't got time to, I've got time to figure out that that kind of stuff like, you know, again, bring it back, bring it back. Nuclear war scenario like this is a different situation because they haven't detected a launch. But the next thing that's going to be happening is now that swimming has been detonated on US soil, is that everyone's spinning up response plans, which is exactly what happens in the film.

The expenditure of workforce on doing forensic fact finding on it. You wouldn't send people unnecessarily into the city. Yeah, you didn't need to be there there and then. So the I'm sure there'd be some kind of data collection, but there wouldn't be any data analysis and then actionable intelligence being generated from it there and then. I don't think at that speed, I just don't know what's happening. Think you put your spot on there, man. Sonia, what do you think? What's the biggest oversell in this film?

I, I mean we've when it comes to military self, our biggest issue we've discussed so far has been an undersell. Yeah, to be fair. So I'm I'm fairly blank on that one for once. That's absolutely fair. I'm not going to ask how this would go down in Germany at all at all. That question is not going to assist my questions, Rick. And stricken from the record, Your Honour, Jack Ryan's shopping list. The humanising part of the film, the mundane part of real life that shows these super spies and badasses are just normal people.

What part of this film, Mike, because you are the father of this particular category. What part of this film, what moment humanises those involved in? Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking about all the all the times that Will Cabot saw him off for. For me, I think it's when Jack Ryan turns up to the office having been paged and he's wearing like he's he's wearing like a a shirt, some chinos with some deck shoes and like a jacket. And we'll come out like someone goes, what is this a paper chase? Because he was like a college student working in his part time job.

I think. I think that maybe is it where it's the stupidest picnic he's having at the end with his girlfriend, with the with the purple television, like feet away from the White House lawn? Yeah, there's not. There's not a lot of humanising besides that, really. Yeah. Sonia, I've got nothing. I like that one particular defence advisor struggling and freaking out because he couldn't open up the deck chair. That was that was pretty good. And I think a great bit of I like just the I'll, I'll, I like just the weird energy of Kathy Mueller just grabbing Jack Ryan's Dick when he's on the phone with Superior again.

I think that's like that's, that's that's the thing I could imagine happening trivia as put a few bits of trivia that I quite enjoy just from IMDb. So the spray can that John Clark uses to cut through the chain link fence is supposed to be a real life CIA chemical spray known as Ice Pissed. Once again, that's ice piss. When asked if a real kind of ice piss could be acquired for the scene, the technical advisor said quote, I don't want to go to prison. Exclamation mark. End Quote. Oh, that's real.

During the opening, a nuclear bomb was showing being rolled out to be loaded onto an Israeli Air Force Skyhawk. However, the bomb designed for the scene could not be physically carried by the A4, so the subsequent scene of the plane had to have a CGI bomb attached in post production. You see, Michael Mann for true veracity, would have put a real fucking bomb on Skyhawk. Michael Mann's not do anything in goddamn post. Nobody got dropping this bomb for real, man, said Mr Mann. California property master Russell Bobbitt also played the Israeli pilot in the opening scene.

The prop picture in his fighter plane is that of real life daughter Jordan Lynn and was chosen before he was cast as the pilot. Can we pick this apart for a second? Because that's weird, right? That is that. What, so like when members of the cast asked to provide pictures of their families that might appear in the film, and then they went, oh, actually we'll have you as the pilot as well. Yeah. I mean, the only thing I can imagine it happened was the one round like the property masters, Garfield, whatever, or like they just said, can you open your wallet and, and, and give me whatever thought was in there.

And he gets the one of like his like, like, like his daughter. And as he's handed it to like, the director, he like, reaches back out for and grabs. And that's like, I want this guy in that fucking plane because he's got this instinctive tick when he reaches for the photo constantly. And that's that's why he takes his eyes off the ball. That's why this whole thing happens. He's in the character. That guy's in the character. And that guy's, he's going to sell the shade of the scene and he really, really, really believe that.

He's like Dad, I really believe, really believe it. And yeah, just always mentioned, but in the scene of getting Jack Ryan married, portfolio talking about Elena Rishkov, Garland, who played Garland played Doctor Elena Rishkov, who was working with Doctor Gun Yanak in sneakers. So just a kind of little. He went to the audience there. The Columbo question, would this film benefit from Peter Falk playing a strongly weird little guy? Yes, he would be the president God or it'd be one of the president's aides.

Like he'd be, he'd be like, or like, you know, the, the cabal of, of senior cabinet members. He an atomic weapons scientist. And he's the one who tells them where the, where the uranium came from. And it takes like 5 minutes. It takes like 5 minutes because he's like it like looks it like looks at a comically long dot matrix print out. And he's like, Yep, tell us, explains the process. That's actually from a batch I might when I was young.

Okay, when I went to the part of the night when I do notes from the piano gallery, When I find reviews on Letterbox that I find funny. One star Ben Affleck plays an annoying smart ass who I couldn't care less for. I would rather dry hump a cheese grater while eating one of those filthy cardboard pizzas you got from a kebab house than watch this film. Can't ever see myself re watching. Not my cup of tea. Clotton acting was horrible. I can't believe Netflix would suggest this. Oof shots fucking fire bread.

When I number one says one star didn't understand entire movie.

One star, one called Bila says my dad made me watch it. 2 1/2 stars from Katherine Kruger. Low key. My fave minor part was that Ben Affleck finds it charming. Or he's bemusing that the CIA is very closely spying on him. A member of the Outfit. It's like fair one. Actually watching this after a look after a Le Carrier film is so funny. Nuclear grade poppycock. Really good scene in this where Afflecks ride is just crashed his car and post for Baltimore and his furiously tight forgot his stylus food asking where warheads stolen in 1968 are.

I like stylus food. I love it. Someone called Lucas says 4 stars, watch this with David. And I said during the tense climax, fuck, this is really good and he told me to calm down. Four stars. I like Ben Affleck brackets. Yes, really. I like Morgan Freeman brackets, duh. I like CIA spy flicks. I like Jack Ryan. I like this film. Enough said. Don't do A twist. Something that's going to be a twist. Yeah, I know. I thought it was going to be a Cadillac that had us in the first half knocking lie thing.

When it's like what? It's like, you know? I like Ben Affleck. Yes, really. I like Morgan Freeman. Duh. I have evidence that will lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton, that kind of thing. You're on my Bakshi. You're on Bakshi. 4 stars. My mom kept spoiling me accidentally, so I'm taking one star off. It would have been more, but my dad's enthusiasm made-up for it. Heart emoji I love my parents undoubtedly the source of my fondest for intrigue. They made this watch so much better from someone called vagina four stars.

That's so insanely wholesome. I love that that's absolutely mint. Five stars Alex Veerhoff says I am now forever suspicious of vending machines mood. I remember that fight has with the guy with the chains in the Victoria yes, that's that's that's mint and the police come like a huge Jack Ryan. We got to help you, Jack Ryan, huge Jack Rimes. And he's like, we gotta help you. Yeah. Do you want us to strangle him for you? Yeah. We've got this. Is he a member of public? Do you want us to help? We've got this.

Then they gotta make a fucking illegal Elliot Petey chokehold and just like sick resisting. That's really much us out have one final category. Is this film pro anti CIA? And finally, after months and months, we have a film that is unequivocally pro CIA. Not unequivocally. So. The scores now are settled to 9 to 4. They're making a comeback. They're making a rush. Yeah. However, let's talk about the next film that we're doing. Yeah, I don't think that I think that all something that all spit is going to last because, yes, we've come to the end of this episode of Clear and Present.

Dudes, please join us again in two weeks time where our next episode will be 2013 Denny Villeneuve film Sicario starring Emily Blunt and Josh Brolin and Benicio Dos Hollow. Thank you. Thank you very much, Rory, for those categories. It's a sterling job. And thank you very much for joining me this evening. Rory and Sonya. I've been Mike. We have been Clear and Present Dudes. Please look us up on Instagram at Clear and Present Dudes. e-mail us for any takes, hot takes at at [email protected].

Yeah. Catches on the flip side, I guess. Yeah. Get fun. Join the Discord as well because it's quiet in there at the moment. It is. We should encourage that. Yeah. Join the Discord link on my threads account, which is at Mike D2049. Cool, Rory. Anything else? That's it. So as usual, as it is every two weeks, we've been clear and present. Fucking hell, we got words at this.

The Sum of All Fears (2002)

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