It wasn't bad for about the first half but it got so completely ridiculous I had to bail. The inciting incident is pretty ballsy for a TV film.
But would a sub's Captain and XO really go out on the sail to see it a nuke exploded a couple miles away? And as dumb as that was, would they really develop strong radiation sickness so quickly? And the captain is given a shot of iodine because of radiation acute radiation sickness and five minutes later he is fine. That's Star Trek medicine, not reality, unless that iodine was laced with amphetamines.
Could an American navy sub really have so many scheming nutters on board? That would be rather terrifying.
There are comparisons to Crimson Tide, but to some degree, submarine movies tend to be very similar because of the nature of subs. And there was a famous Soviet sub incident in the Cuban Missile Crisis where the officers differed sharply on whether to use a nuclear torpedo.
The great thing about Crimson Tide was both sides had a fairly plausible argument. Though, granted, at least to my civilian understanding, the captain there could not relieve the XO for refusing to launch regardless of the XO's reasoning. That's the whole point of the two man rule.
But it all seemed somewhat reasonable. In this film, you have scheming nutters and officers easily swayed by nutters. And one of the nutters believes the USSR still exists. Silly silly silly. Also, the stakes here are much less than those in Crimson Tide. If indeed WWIII has broken out, they are just one boat of many others, in addition to all the other nukes in the US arsenal. They are in most practical terms pretty much irrelevant.
