Mind Over Muscles
Jack Ryan’s first action scene comes 90 minutes into The Hunt for Red October. Desperate to convince the USS Dallas, the only American ship to have potentially encountered Red October, that Captain Ramius intends to defect and not attack the U.S., Ryan dangles from a barebones chopper, above the choppy waters of the Atlantic where Dallas is surfaced.
McTiernan drops the slick, assured camera movements that mark the rest of the movie for an almost vérité style. The sound of wind and the chopper blades fill the sound track, making most of the dialogue—delivered via radio chatter and military slang—almost incomprehensible. The camera feels out of control as it whips around the chopper and the sub, cutting back to the sailors and the pilots. In the middle of it all is Ryan, hanging from a cord.
Make no mistake, Ryan isn’t helpless. He’s the one who demanded to be flown out in awful weather; he’s the one who made the chopper use its emergency fuel to wait on Dallas‘ arrival; and when the pilot deems the entire thing too risky and tries to pull him back in, Ryan is the one who decides to drop into the ocean, forcing Dallas to use its rescue diver to pull him in.
It’s a heroic moment to be sure, but one very unlike the those of the fictional heroes of Red October‘s day. Throughout the 1980s, chiseled men like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Jean-Claude Van Damme ruled the screen, making even Clint Eastwood—hose Dirty Harry movies pushed the envelope in the 1970s—seem creaky and old. Before helming Red October, McTiernan made Predator in 1987, a movie that builds tension by letting musclebound soldiers played by Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers get torn to shreds by an alien. Bruce Willis may have been a comedy star, and his character John McClane an everyman, when McTiernan made Die Hard in 1988, but he still has a muscle shirt and a machine gun, making him more beefy than the average moviegoer.
In 1990, Baldwin’s most notable feature were his incredible blue eyes, effective when Ryan’s staring down the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs but not in a firefight with a KGB agent. Yet he uses these eyes, along with his slightly embarrassed grin and his constantly rumpled hair, to indicate intelligence, thoughtfulness. Which are exactly the qualities that make Ryan the hero of Red October. He’s in the Atlantic because he’s studied enough Russian naval history to know that Ramius means to defect and that the Soviets are lying when they say he’s going rogue. He’s the only one wary enough to fight to realize that their choices could lead to another world war.
In other words, Baldwin’s Jack Ryan is more of an inaction hero: a man whose strength comes from waiting to consider all other possibilities and trusting on his intellect. He’ll move when he has to but he’s wise enough to realize when that need arises and no sooner.
