History YMMV / TheHuntForRedOctober

** The Soviet [[ThePoliticalOfficer political officer]] who is named ''[[UsefulNotes/VladimirPutin Putin]]''. Who bears a striking resemblance to ol' Vlad, as well as him having been a KGB officer in his youth[[note]]He was an OfficeDrone, not a field agent[[/note]].

* Indeed,the ''Magazine/{{Mad}}'' satire of the film ''at the time'' was called "Search For Last October"!

** The Soviet [[ThePoliticalOfficer political officer]] who is named ''[[UsefulNotes/VladimirPutin Putin]]''. Who bears a striking resemblance to ol' Vlad.

** In one scene, Mancuso says "Central Intelligence Agency? Now, there's a contradiction in terms." Creator/ScottGlenn, who plays Mancuso, would star in ''Film/TheBourneUltimatum'' as [[TheManBehindTheMan CIA director Ezra Kramer]].

** Creator/GatesMcFadden, already known for playing [[Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration Dr. Beverly Crusher]] plays Cathy Ryan. In "Film/JackRyanShadowRecruit," Jack himself would be played by [[Creator/ChrisPine Captain]] [[Film/StarTrek2009 Kirk.]]

* AlternativeCharacterInterpretation: The movie seems to imply that the real reason for Ramius defecting was less anger of his wife's death and more [[ScrewTheRulesImDoingWhatsRight concern]] over the fact that the Red October's primary purpose would be to start a nuclear war due to its stealth. In that context, Ryan's [[AdaptationExplanationExtrication comments]] about Ramius's wife are more that he no longer has any reason to go back home.

* CommonKnowledge: "Sean Connery plays a Russian sub commander". Except Ramius is Lithuanian, which is a key plot point in his defection. So, he is a commander of a Russian sub, but not a Russian commander of a Russian sub. (It's like a "large animal hospital" - is it a large hospital, or a hospital for animals that are large?)

** Jack's uneasiness with handling a gun, coupled with Ramius explicitly warning him, "Be careful what you shoot at", is quite uncomfortable after Creator/AlecBaldwin fired a gun that was accidentally loaded with real bullets while making the film ''Rust'', killing the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injuring the director Joel Souza in October 2021. As an eerie coincidence, Hutchins grew up in Murmansk, the site of ''Red October'''s launch within the film.

* CriticalResearchFailure: Overlaps with outright DanBrowned in some instances:
** The novel has a whole bunch of critical research failures regarding the internal layout of the Typhoon class missile submarine that, while understandable, also betrays a serious case of ArtMajorPhysics (a submarine with a pressure hull that flattened would have an ''enormously'' compromised diving depth), which also extends to the properties of the impellers used in the Caterpillar Drive[[note]]nowhere nearly as exotic as depicted; British Trafalgar-class submarines new in 1984 beginning from HMS ''Torbay'' onwards used Jet Pumps, which are a form of impeller and needed no special laws of hydrodynamics[[/note]] and the ultra-high-pressure reactor plant used in the Alfa-class submarines [[note]]all made up, and water wouldn't function as a working fluid in such conditions - incidentally, Clancy dismisses a liquid metal reactor when that's what the real Alfa(Lyra/Project 705) class had![[/note]]. The movie averts this with the Caterpillar Drive being turned into a magnetohydrodynamic propulsion system, which is more plausible and which have actually been built, but which are severely speed-restricted and wouldn't be worth using even on a missile submarine.
** The novel has Jack give the president and Jeffrey Pelt a run-down on how Soviet missile submarines differ from American ones - except that it's absolutely ''wrong''. Soviet missile submarines from the Project 667 ("Yankee" and "Delta") classes were configured nearly identically to their American counterparts. Only the ''Typhoons'' had the differences in question.
** Again from the novel - a major Russian naval base would have more than one surgeon on duty, and given the rivalry between the military and the Communist party, a drunk surgeon using his party connections to attempt to get away from a court-martial offense would have created one ''hell'' of an uproar and would be harshly punished for it. If Ramius had lost his wife to a drunk surgeon who was the son of a party official in the real USSR, he would have had his retribution pretty quickly and be backed up by his superiors all the way to the highest ranks.
*** This is partially justified: The novel goes into considerable detail on Ramius' life and the events that lead up to his decision to defect. His wife dying from a botched surgery by a drunk surgeon--who worked for a clinic that served the Party Elite and not the military--was just one of several unjust events he had been witness to or experienced. Ultimately, Ramius blamed the State for his wife's death. The final straw came at her funeral. The state had robbed him of being able to pray for her soul at her funeral and the comfort--or even just the illusion--that he may be reunited with her in the afterlife.
** The novel's scheme of blowing up the USS ''Ethan Allen'' to confuse the Russians into believing that the Red October had sunk is ridiculous because the ''Ethan Allen'' class of missile submarine displaced in the range of 6000 tons, a full 1000 tons less than a ''Los Angeles''-class sub like the ''Dallas'' and a ''fifth'' of ''Red October's'' whopping 30,000+ ton mass. Unless the Soviets were brain-dead they'd notice there was far too little debris for such a large submarine.
*** Partially acknowledged in-universe: while the ''Ethan Allen'' provided some debris and a SONAR signature from the explosion, the main part of the deception involved a depth gauge removed from ''Red October'' and dumped in the debris field along with an SS-20 Seahawk missile, bearing their serial numbers and other identifying marks. The location was also just a few hundred miles off the US Eastern Coast in deep water which makes it difficult for the Russians to make any attempt to salvage the wreckage themselves.

* {{Narm}}: To some native Russian speakers, Creator/SeanConnery speaking Russian in his trademark Scottish accent is ''hilarious''. It's kind of justified in that Connery's character is Lithuanian, so Russian wouldn't be his native language to begin with. Of course, that still doesn't make sense why a person from a Baltic country would sound Scottish. Also, Creator/AlecBaldwin's American accent when speaking Russian is so thick as to be unintelligible.

** Rear Admiral Painter (played by actor and Tennessee senator Fred Thompson) has a small, but very memorable role in the film.

* UnintentionalPeriodPiece: It's naturally become quite amusing to see how much Creator/TomClancy gushes over then-cutting edge computing technology in 1984, to say nothing of its prominent focus on the UsefulNotes/ColdWar, which at the time had been seeing the highest levels of hostility since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

** Jeffrey Jones has a single scene as Tyler, who is a subtle MrExposition for BackStory of the Caterpillar tech.

** Much of this confusion comes from the fact that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was technically [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin many different republics unified under a single soviet]], which was a type of governing council. Each of the republics (to include Russia) had their own soviets, though all were subservient to the Supreme Soviet. So technically, the Soviet Union wasn't Russia, and not all Soviets Russians, although in practical terms Russia more or less ruled the Soviet Union, leading to the common conflation in the west. This also led to the weird but important historical footnote that the last country to declare independence from the Soviet Union was Russia, at which point the USSR effectively disintegrated.

** Jack's uneasiness with handling a gun is quite uncomfortable after Alec Baldwin fired a gun that was accidentally loaded with real bullets while making the film ''Rust'', killing the cinematographer and injuring the director.

** Jack's uneasiness with handling a gun is quite uncomfortable after Alex Baldwin fired a gun that was accidentally loaded with real bullets while making the film ''Rust'', killing the cinematographer and injuring the director.

* HarsherInHindsight: The fate of ''Konovalov'' in the book is very close to that of ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster Kursk]]'', right up to the rescue buoy being stuck.

* GeniusBonus: "I have become Death, destroyer of worlds", an "ancient Hindu text", was also uttered by Oppenheimer during the explosion of the atomic bomb (a fact to which Ramius alludes in the film).

*** This is partially justified: The novel goes into considerable detail on Ramius' life and the events that lead up to his decision to defect. His wife dying from a botched surgery by a drunk surgeon--who worked for a clinic that served the Party Elite and not the military--was just one of several unjust events he had been witness to or experienced. Ultimately, Ramius blamed the State for his wife's death. The final straw came at her funeral. The state had robbed him of being unable to pray for her soul at her funeral and the comfort--or even just the illusion--that he may be reunited with her in the afterlife.

* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic: Hymn to Red October, written by Music/BasilPoledouris.

** Note: Ramius wasn't responsible for the torpedo. That was Captain Mancuso, commanding an unfamiliar Soviet missile sub with what couldn't even be described as a skeleton crew made up of a handful of Soviet officers and a smaller handful of American sailors, with the timely help of his first officer, Lt. Commander Thompson, using ''Dallas'' to DrawAggro on the torpedo before using countermeasures and evasive maneuvers to evade it themselves.