Bloody great movie with a fantasic cast Embodies everything I like about Tom Clancy: this guy doesn't back off. Usually in a story like this, you have the hero avoiding the bomb in the last second but he sees it thru, and after that supposed climax of the film the story really picks up on the suspension level. Kinda reminds me of RED STORM RISING - any other author would have taken 600 pages to avoid the Russian attack, Clancy has Europe overrun within the first 50 and goes from there. He's by no means a great author, but what he writes comes off incredibly realistic. Only thing I do have to criticize is that he tries to mix in too much secret agencies stuff while he's a military expert (and I'd say more so than four NATO generals together). I'd really see a collaboration by him and Forsythe
1. That movie sucked. 2. It bore only a passing resemblence to the book. 3. It was chronologically fucked with respect to the novels. 4. It was a sad attempt at a franchise reboot. 5. Ben Affleck ain't no damn Jack Ryan. And Pearl Harbor sucked.
Red Storm Rising was one of the best cold-war era WWIII books EVAH! The tactics were derived from Clancy and Bond playing around with the old pen and paper HARPOON naval wargame, and it got the attention of navy strategic planners at the highest level when it was published. Specifically, the backfire raid that decimated the carrier battle group.
Clear and Present Danger > Sum of All Fears. Patriot Games > Clear and Present Danger. Hunt for Red October > Patriot Games. Sum of All Fears should've been > Hunt for Red October, but they had to: 1.) Hire Ben Affleck. 2.) Change the bad guys from Islamic terrorists to neo-nazi terrorists. This is all IMHO, of course.
I agree whole heartedly on all counts. The book was far, FAR superior. Clancy is on record stating that he hated the movie adaptation. Something along the lines of, "They asked me how follow the story and turn it into a movie and ignored every bit of advice."
Sum of All Fears. In my opinion. The book was much better than the movie. But the book was far from Clancys best work. I believe the Red Storm Rising was Clancys best though I've heard that Larry Bond deserves alot of the credit. In many ways as far as World War III books go, Red Storm Rising was in many ways a "best case" scenario. No nuclear weapons. No chemical or biological weapons. The Soviets aside from taking Iceland and smashing the Nimitz battlegroup can't seem to find their ass with both hands..
Movie sucked. Hollywood changing the bad guys sucked as well. The only cool thing was the Russians T-shirt: "I am a bomb maker. If you see me running try to catch up." Book was cool. Red Storm Rising and the Hunt for Red October are my fav's from Clancy. I wish he would write more books like them instead of his other ones. Red Storm Rising also had some stuff that showed itself to be true (in the Gulf War I and II): Munitions would be far higher then expected even with advanced weapons, helicopters would be more vunerable then everyone belives, and of course he had the stealth fighter.
Have to agree with everyone else here re: book=great, movie=suck. The book nuked the Super Bowl and included a face-off between Jack and the President over nuking Iran(?) in retaliation. As far as Clancy books go, it should go Red Storm Rising>Hunt For Red October>Rainbow Six>Debt of Honor (if only for the oddly familiar ending)>the rest.
So who do you guys thing the best Jack Ryan was? I know Alec Baldwin is universally hated by everyone to the right of Nightbird, but I always thought (shame on me!) that he was actually very good in Hunt for Red October. Ford took the role as his own (as he usually does). But Affleck? Big meh!
I would be considered conservative by most, but I'm a big fan of Baldwin. He was great in Hunt for Red October and his appearances on SNL are the stuff of legends. That said, Ford is by far the best Jack Ryan.
I liked Baldwin marginally better than Ford as Jack Ryan, but both were good. It's too bad Baldwin didn't stay with the role. He might be a card carrying member of F.A.G., but I like him in most of his roles.
I really want to get a bomb-maker T-shirt. That'd be sweet. Its really too bad they won't make 'Debt of Honor' or 'Bear and the Dragon' into movies.
Jack Ryan? Baldwin, Ford,..............................Affleck way down the list. I liked Baldwin because I thought he was more true to the way the role was written. Jack Ryan was supposed to be a guy who wrote naval history books and was accidentally forced into his role in dealing with the Soviet sub because of an accident (in the book, a four man team of specialists were supposed to board the sub instead of Ryan, but their helicopter crashed in the ocean, killing three and severely wounding the fourth so Ryan was called in). Ford has too great a reputation as a "man of action" already to be credible as the "reluctant writer turned spy".
I read an interview that Clancy did a few years ago where he said flat out that he "hated writing". I said basically that he wrote "The Hunt For Red October" because he had this idea running around in his head that he just couldn't let go. I think this shows in his novels because in my opinion after "The Cardinal of the Kremlin" the books rapidly tail off in quality. It seems to me that based on the nonfiction stuff he has written, Clancy probably enjoys things like making up the scenarios and things like that. Witness "SSN". Scenario very cool. Writing sucks big red bricks.
Well it sure made him a fortune as well as a household name. Bet he's not complaining about that. Although a lot of people wonder if Al Quaeda didn't get the idea for 9-11 from the end of Debt of Honor. Not that that would be Clancy's fault or anything, but I'll bet it weighs on him just a bit.
Of course you could also ask if Al Queda got the idea for 9-11 from 1) the guy who planned to assassinate President Nixon by flying a passenger jet into the White House. He murdered an airport security guard and the airliner co-pilot before being wounded by a police sniper and killing himself. 2) the FedEx pilot who tried to hijack that FedEx Cargo plane in the 1990s and crash it into the FedEx hub in Memphis. He attacked the crew with a spear gun and sledgehammer before being subdued by them. All three of the crew were severely injured. 3) The hijackers who while aboard a passenger plane on the way to Cuba ordered the crew to fly the plane into a nuclear powerplant. The pilot told them that because of low cloud cover he couldn't find the plant. 4) The guy who suicided the single engine plane into the side of the White House early in Clintons term.
By the time of HFRO, Ryan was already in the CIA working in London. The revisionism of Clancy's Red Rabbit aside (action hero Jack Ryan intervening in the attempted assasination of Pope John Paul II! ), in HFRO, he was just an analyst, though, so him actually being on the sub was a fluke because of the helo crash. Sum of All Fears was "okay" as a movie, but it was another terrible adaptation of a Clancy book. It was miles better than Clear and Present Danger, though. Baldwin was the best Ryan. Ford is way, way too old to play him, especially in Patriot Games when Ryan was in his early 30s. None of the movies have gotten his wife right (or at all, in the case of Sum of All Fears). Cathy Ryan, a petite blonde, has been played by two curvy redheads. I'm rereading Rainbow Six now for the first time since it came out in 1998 or so and I have to say that it's not very good. It seems like Clancy wrote the book to sell the video game. His plotting and dialogue that was so good in his earlier works are all but gone in Rainbow Six. The subsequent books aren't really any better.
I agree, Baldwin was the best. Didn't see Sum of All Fears yet. Best book was Debt of Honor, followed by Hunt for Red October, then Red Storm Rising IMO. But then, I'm a huge Pacific War buff, so Debt of Honor naturally appealed to me. Cardinal in the Kremlin blew, and later on there was too much 'the hero is right because he's right' stuff with Ryan - it became two dimensional, with the wrong way and Ryan's way. I like a little more philosophical meat than that.
Hell I'd put it first just ahead of Red October and I'd recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it yet.
Here's how I'd rank his books: Hunt For Red October Red Storm Rising Debt of Honor Executive Orders Without Remorse Patriot Games Cardinal In the Kremlin The Bear and the Dragon Sum of All Fears Rainbow 6
The movie was pretty good, but the book was excellent. Red Sorm Rising and Hunt for Red October are my favorite Clancy books. I learned enough about Naval tactics from those to kick some serious ass with the computer simulations Harpoon and Harpoon 2. I gotta get Harpoon 3.
I'd honestly love to see Clancy get to a show on showtime or HBO about geo-politics and a world war III senario....
The "francise" books are pretty clearly marked as "Tom Clancy's" whatever, Net Force or Splinter Cell or Ghost Recon, with Clancy's name on top for sales and recognition and the book's author's name in smaller print below. Kind of like the "Kurt Austin / Tales of NUMA" stuff published under Clive Cussler's umbrella. All the books in question here, the Jack Ryan or Mr. Clark stuff, that's Clancy's work.
I thought I'd listed my rankings of Clancy books, but I guess the board (or the wonky computer at the hotel where I was staying ) ate it. Anyhoo: Without Remorse* Clear and Present Danger* The Hunt for Red October Patriot Games The Sum of All Fears Red Storm Rising** Debt of Honor The Cardinal of the Kremlin Executive Orders Rainbow Six The Bear and the Dragon*** The Teeth of the Tiger*** If you'll note, the books ranked lowest on my list are in the sequence that they were published. Debt of Honor was the last decent book he wrote, IMHO. The quality really dropped off after that and hit rock bottom with his last two books.That being said, though I haven't read every one of them, I've enjoyed all of his nonfiction books quite bit. *Clark is my favorite character in the Ryanverse, so those two books rank high. **Clancy loses points with me with that book because he didn't get the ground warfare stuff right (he was too much of a Navy/Air Force groupie back then). He somewhat redeemed himself with Executive Orders, which came after he'd actually learned something about armor operations with his nonfiction book about armored cavalry. For a good depiction of WWIII ground warfare, read Ralph Peters' Red Army. ***It's clear with those two books that Clancy's jumped the shark. Cartoonish plots and dialogue. He's trading on his past successes. Supposedly he was going to put out another book last June, but no sign of it so far.
