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  • Accidental Innuendo: Dodge does this twice when introducing Lt. Lake to the rest of the crew, much to his embarrassment.
    Dodge: All right, look, gentlemen! I know this is an unusual situation. Can't be easy for Lt. Lake to be thrown into a jungle such as this, and I know it will make things hard on all of us... (crew laughs) Let me re-phrase that. It's going to make things difficult on all of us as well. But, if we just work together as a team, I'm sure that we can handle ourselves... (more laughter) ...comport ourselves as professionals. That is all.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: There is exactly one person who should 100% have been kicked out of the Navy in this movie & that's the cook. He has no concept of food safety whatsoever and his 'screw-ups' are genuinely foul. He's going to kill people, several of them. And yet its played for laughs like the rest of these guys.
  • Alternative Joke Interpretation: The whole improvised whalesong scene. Either Dodge was miming to Sonar's tape recordings to nudge him into playing them against the hull like Sonar had described and Sonar went way off-script, with the crew being too bewildered and/or terrified of being detected to stop him, or it went All According to Plan and Dodge got the exact results he expected.
  • Awesome Music: "Anchors Aweigh", the US Naval Academy fight song, plays as the Stingray goes out. Complete with awesome military choir.
  • Critical Dissonance: The film was panned by critics, but given relatively positive reviews by casual audiences (12% vs. 62% in Rotten Tomatoes). It even has a few fans among military otaku types in real life, mainly thanks to the surprisingly well researched and interesting war game that moves the plot.
  • Esoteric Happy Ending: In the film, Commander Dodge proves it would be perfectly possible for a rogue state to launch a nuclear sneak attack on any American harbor using a diesel sub. While a war-game's very purpose is to start planning to counter such an eventuality instead of dismissing the idea out of hand, being implied that the in-universe observers will presumably take note of the results, it still shows how easy would it be for a less prepared country to suffer such an attack (the film's exact war-game has been done by the US Navy in real life, and the diesel boats often win because of their utter silence when in silent mode, unlike nuclear boats which must cool their reactors at all times).
  • Genius Bonus: During the final chase, Howard yells into the squawk box, "This is what I live for! DBF!!" DBF is short for "Diesel Boats Forever!", and was the unofficial motto of the US Navy's long-since-retired diesel submarine fleet as nuclear-powered subs became more common. Howard is relishing the chance to best a modern nuclear boat with his venerable diesel sub. Also a bit of Actor Allusion, as Harry Dean Stanton was a US Navy submariner in WWII.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: The idea of an "outdated" diesel-electric submarine besting a "modern" nuclear fleet has proven itself to be entirely plausible.
    • In 1999, The Dutch diesel-electric submarine HNLMS Walrus, taking advantage of their near total silence while running on batteries, was able to (simulated) sink nine US Navy vessels including a nuclear aircraft carrier and the exercise command ship without ever being detected.
    • Then, in 2006, a Chinese diesel-electric sub went undetected by the USS Kitty Hawk battlegroup until it surfaced within torpedo range.
    • Not long after this movie came out, the Navy base in Charleston was shut down.
    • The leering about the first female submariner is more uncomfortable when you know that, less than a year after the first women were allowed to serve on subs, the crew hid a camera in the shower and distributed videos of the women showering around the boat.
  • Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: The movie is filled with errors on how submarines operate, but it's been a favorite of real US Navy submariners for decades precisely because of how hilarious they find those errors to be.
  • Retroactive Recognition: For fans of NCIS the dive officer is none other than the long running NCIS Director Jenny Shepard aka Lauren Holly.

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