The Atomic Submarine (1959) – Review

Hollywood has produced quite a few alien invasion movies over the years and while most of them dealt with UFOs in the traditional style of those found in films like Ray Harryhausen’s Earth vs the Flying Saucers it was Allied Artists who took a different tack with their science fiction entry The Atomic Submarine. This time out it would be a USO (Unidentified Submerged Object) threatening mankind, thus we don’t get your typical outer space creature feature but a more watery encounter.

The plot of The Atomic Submarine is very simple, someone or something is sinking ships up near the Arctic Circle, including seven military submarines, and thus the government tasks the captain of the atomic submarine Tigershark, Commander Dan Wendover (Dick Foran), to ready his crew for a perilous mission to investigate these “disasters” and put an end to whatever is threatening this all-important trade route. This film goes out of its way to state how much shipping goes through the northern channels and I’m not entirely sure how accurate that is but I guess that particular plot element is needed to get things moving.  Of course, no mission is complete without a crew of stock characters to plug into the script and to spice things up; this will include womanizing Lieutenant Commander Richard “Reef” Holloway (Arthur Franz), the Tigershark’s executive officer who must put up with pacifist Dr. Carl Neilson Jr. (Brett Halsey) as a bunkmate, and these two idiots will provide more actual conflict than the one we get from the alien threat.

“Will you two just kiss and make up?”

Much of the film’s short running time is spent with the crew of the Tigershark sailing all over the Arctic Circle as they chase after what turns out to be an underwater saucer-shaped craft, with a sole light atop its upper dome that results in them dubbing the enemy Cyclops. After surviving an electrical attack from this extraterrestrial threat they go on the offensive – that this later involves the Captain ordering the Tigershark to ram the alien, which is but one of many ridiculous tactics this movie employees – but I will give the film credit when it comes to onscreen violence because when the crew venture aboard the “Cyclops” two of them are melted by some kind of heat ray and another is crushed by a closing hatchway.

This was not typical for a genre film of this era. The Atomic Submarine employs a classic science fiction motivation to their alien, it has come to Earth as a scout ship looking for a plant to colonize, but what is surprising is that we soon learn that it plans on taking Holloway and several other specimens back to its home planet for further study so they can alter their own physiology to a better life on Earth. I must say, that this is another thing you don’t find to often in your average science fiction flick of this period. Lucky for us, our heroes don’t take that kind of shit from alien scum.

“Set phasers on stun!”

Stray Observations:

• James Cameron would later tackle the idea of a “Close Encounter of the Watery Kind” in his film The Abyss, only his aliens were slightly less dickish.
• Sir Ian Hunt is introduced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for oceanography but as there is no such Nobel Prize in this field I’d double-check his credentials to make sure he wasn’t an alien spy.
• The Tigershark deployed their frogmen to check out the damage they received after being hit by an underwater electric storm but they are in simple wet suits and would not survive the freezing arctic water for more than a couple of minutes.
• The USO returns the North Pole to “recharge its batteries” from the Earth’s magnetic field but Magnetic North Pole is not located under the Geographic North Pole, so I’m not sure what the hell these aliens were doing.
• The Commander orders that the sub be “rigged for silent running” but when they detect the approaching alien craft he proceeds to use the ship’s intercom to bark orders. Does he not understand what “silent running” means?
• Our heroes deduce that the “Flying Saucer” always returns to the North Pole between attacks but instead of simply waiting for its inevitable return they spend weeks chasing it all over the Arctic Circle. And this is the Navy’s idea of top men?

I wouldn’t trust these guys to operate my bathtub toys.

This science fiction entry from Allied Artist was clearly on a shoestring budget, with approximately 30% of what we see consisting of stock footage, and even the other 10% of original special effects were also recycled heavily throughout the film’s running time, but despite budgetary limitations it did manage to pull off an interesting story about man’s first encounter with an alien visitor – something akin to what viewers would find on an episode of Outer Limits – and it did inspire Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea which would hit theatres a couple of years later. The one element that stands out as somewhat unusual for the period is the inclusion of the “pacifistic scientist” and even more interesting is the fact that the script doesn’t deride him as being some kind of commie coward and we even get a pretty intelligent debate between Neilson and Holloway. Now, the movie ends with the realization that sometimes you do have to shoot the enemy in the face, especially if he’s an ugly cyclops sonofabitch.

Say what you will about the film’s budgeted effects the alien did look cool.

Overall, The Atomic Submarine is a better-than-average science fiction thriller, one that overcame the danger being  nothing more than a collection stock character types and every overused trope from the genre – all of these films have to have your standard scientist onboard to explain things as well as at least one brash idiot who wants to shoot everything in sight – and if you can look past the stilted acting and bargain basement props the core idea of a submarine performing a manhunt – or alien hunt if you will – under the Arctic Circle, is a pretty cool idea. Director Spencer Gordon Bennet did his best with the tools he had on hand and while this film may not have the fun adventurous spirit of Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or the social-political themes illustrated in such classics as The Day the Earth Stood Still that doesn’t stop this entry from being a decent enough B-Movie and well worth checking out.