Well, the best answer to this question is to start by pointing out that no one has ever made a perfect submarine movie. As a former nuclear ballistic missile submariner who also has always had a fascination with World War II fleet boats (i.e., US submarines), the fact is that every submarine movie ever made seems to have had some major problem with it, regardless of its good points. Thus, what you really have to focus on are the good points, unless they are so wanting that the movie is what we aboard boomers used to call, "dogsh*tters." CRIMSOM TIDE is a dogsh*tter of the first order. Pure TDU ("Trash Disposal Unit") fodder. Hokiest thing imaginable. A total waste of great actors, too.
DAS BOOT is the best in most respects, except that the hangdog attitude that the officers wind up displaying as the film goes on has always struck me as very hard to believe. Absent more personal research into German submariners' memoirs of their activities which might conceivably reveal a factual basis for that, I will remain skeptical.
ICE STATION ZEBRA has a lot of good points, even if it is basically classic light-weight Hollywood entertainment. (****SPOILER ALERT****) The casualty in the torpedo room (apart from a lot of nonsensical B.S. about what caused it) is not badly rendered at all, considering. I liked the the run-up to that where they looked for a lead in the ice through which to surface, too. GRAY LADY DOWN, on the other hand, which I first saw on TV only shortly after my own first patrol, I thought utterly sucked.
RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP is a very well made movie that works so well as a movie that it makes even a submariner forget how utterly unrealistic it generally is. Basically the same thing can be said of HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. I bought copies of both.
UP PERISCOPE is a favorite, especially since I first became interested in submarines by the book it is based on at the age of nine (and in spite of the fact they deviated substantially from the original plot). James Garner and Edmond O'Brien both did a nice job with their parts. Unfortunately, it demonstrates much less in the way of submarine operations than a typical submarine movie usually does.
OPERATION PETTICOAT is one of my favorite movies of all time of any genre, and is a lot of fun without doing as much violence to the realities of submarine operations in WWII as you would assume (I suggest you read my review here on IMDB re the same). Submarine operations in real life are always spiced up in a significant way with a fair dose of some of the best real-life humor you'll ever encounter, and at least some of the humor in this film was inspired by true events.
OPERATION PACIFIC is chock-full of hokey melodramatics (as is DESTINATION TOKYO, to some extent) but at least it portrays, however unrealistically, an almost fair cross-section of US Pacific Fleet submarine operations during the war: guerrilla support, hunting Japanese warships, and lifeguarding for air raids; even the "Great Torpedo Fiasco" (which in real life should have been treated as a full-fledged scandal complete with Congressional investigation) is portrayed; ironically, however, the submarines' principal mission, the sinking of 55% of all the Japanese cargo & personnel shipping destroyed during the war, is totally ignored.
TORPEDO RUN was poor. So, I seem to recall, was CRASH DIVE. HELLCATS OF THE NAVY is best watched only because it is not only the only movie I know of featuring an introduction by the real Fleet Admiral Chest Nimitz, CINCPAC during almost the entire the war and former submariner himself, but it is also the only movie in which both future President of the United States Ronald Reagan and future First Lady Nancy Davis appeared together (this latter aspect was very scary to watch for the first time in the year 1981.) Unfortunately, these kinds of films represented the typical sort grade-B entertainment that submarine movies came to gain a low reputation for.
U-571 was pretty forgettable. The stiff performances and hokey dramatics don't reflect accurately on what it is like to be aboard a submarine.
ENEMY BELOW and THE BEDFORD INCIDENT (along with the spooky ON THE BEACH (original version) are worth seeing though not necessarily especially realistic, as is the much more realistic THE CRUEL SEA which, however, portrays submarines only from the point of view of submarine hunters on the surface.
If you have any more questions, just ask. :)
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