COLUMN | What does China's "Crimson Tide" tell us about Asia-Pacific geopolitics? Operation Hadal, the People's Liberation Army Navy and perceptions of the West

If you like the sight of a heroic Chinese splitting open the shaven head of a burly, bearded western mercenary with a fire axe as he battles to prevent a nuclear explosion on a secret underwater base, then you will love the Dante Lam-directed film Operation Hadal. There is bitter hand-to-hand combat, grenade-firing robotic dogs, and a familiar, split-second countdown to nuclear Armageddon that James Bond fans will relish.

The action thriller cost CNY1 billion (US$147 million) to produce in Qingdao, making it one of the most expensive Chinese films ever made, and it involved the construction of a full-scale replica of a submarine, the on-screen death of at least a dozen western mercenaries from the fictional state of Siekerman at the hands of the courageous Jiaolong Assault Team of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) Marine Corps, and the destruction of two enemy submarines and two hidden subsea military complexes, fiendishly located in a volcanically active area of the South China Sea near the Chinese coast. The film was released in cinemas in China last year, but is now showing on flights to Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai with English subtitles.

If you have not seen it (and you should see it), the best summary would be that it represents a Chinese adaptation of Crimson Tide, consciously imitating the 1995 Hollywood blockbuster starring Denzel Washington and the late Gene Hackman. In that film, daring Denzel’s character battles both a renegade Russian submarine and treachery aboard his own vessel, but this reboot comes with a strongly nationalist and pro-China twist.

It is contemporary, with a PLAN sonar operator being told by his colleague that “AI will take your job” (spoiler alert – the human later makes the right call, and saves all of China!). It opens with a real-life offshore oil platform being seized by the villainous, gun-toting westerners who are trying to upload data from their stricken autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) which has crashed into a pipeline in a typhoon.

There are Chinese special forces flying in with jetpacks to rescue the oil workers, gun battles galore, and submarines apparently built without automatic fire suppression systems, as evidenced by a heroic scene with a manual fire extinguisher.