 Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jerry Feige. It's a five o'clock clock on a given Wednesday, and we have George Casey in here to do the movie show. And the movie we're looking at today, it's a very interesting movie, and it has relevance to our strange and difficult times, and it's called The Wolf's Call, French movie. George, did you like it? Yes, it was very interesting. It keeps you at the edge of your seat throughout the most of the whole movie, and yeah, I liked it. I said that all those people died at the end, but it was a very good and very much for the current situation of what we're dealing with. Tell me how, first, we should know just the general environment of the movie. So it's a couple of French submarines, a bunch of French submariners, French foreign policy, French military policy, I guess. I think it takes place in Marseille, wherever the French naval base is in the south of France. And it's about a young fellow who has very good hearing, and he can spot a pattern of sound on a scope more than most human beings can do it. And then you get into the contention between one French submarine, and gee, I guess it's the Russians, but it's also, it's the Turks, I think, isn't it? They're both, the underground submarine is Al-Qaeda. Oh, that's right, yeah. And it's not, it's both submarines that are into play are both French submarines. Right. One of them is non-nuclear and one of them is nuclear. One of them is not immediately at the front end of their technology. I think they're both nuclear. The non-nuclear was the one that they found at the bottom of the sea that was, they finally figured out it was Al-Qaeda, you know, was jihadists. Yeah. But the two battling submarines, one was Grand Champ, and the other one was Al Fort, you know, at the end, those were both French. One was an escort for the other. The Titan, or Titan, was the escort for the Formidable. The Formidable was the one that had the nuclear warhead. That's what I'm talking about. The Titan was not nuclear, or at least it didn't have nuclear warheads. It didn't have and we had two scenarios in here. One somewhere in North Africa, I guess, where they're trying to extract, right? No, extract French soldiers from some. Syria, Syria. Yeah. Extract French soldiers from, you know, a battlefield. Right. Okay. And you get to meet the crew. You get to meet the technology. And then, you know, the crew and technology, you know, they evolved because there is an issue somewhere in the North Sea with a Russian submarine. And it's that old contention between submarine and submarine in the Cold War. In this case, the Formidab is a nuclear and nuclear missile submarine. The most advanced submarine the French have. And it's in contention with a Russian submarine, which is up there, and involved in war games, if you will, war tactics with the French. And that's very interesting because you thought up to this point that the only kinds of, you know, contention between submarines was American submarines versus Russian. The Cold War submarine game. But no, in this case, there are no American vessels involved. It is only French and it is their technology, their crews, their systems. You know, the whole thing is French and you get to see it through the eyes of the French. That's a new experience. Okay, but now you said, and this is really important, you said that this is very relevant to our times. And you said that before the show began. And I would like to hear your thoughts on it. A lot of these, the scenario here is very much for the current times. The missile, but we'll get into the specifics, the missile that was coming from Russia, or we thought they thought it was coming from Russia, right? Because Russia was going to invade Finland, right? That threatening to invade Finland. Then the operation in Syria, off the Tartus coast, where the French submarine, the Titan, that was because French military undercover military were in Syria, killing jihadists or whatever in Syria, or maybe getting against Assad's people, I don't know. But they were in Syria. And that they were run, the submarine, Titan was there to pick up after the operation, these French military guys that were undercover to get them back on the ship and take them back to France. To extract them. Yeah, to extract them from France. Now, this guy, I think it was named Chartaine, the guy who really hears really good, really fantastic hearing at Sonar. The wolf's call means when you hear a sonar and then you drop a bomb on them. That's the wolf's call. That's what in Navy slang, that's what wolf's call means, right? Well, no, no, wolf's call is the sound signature of a particular class of submarine. And he had the ability to recognize that sound signature. And it isn't always possible. You need somebody with very good ears to distinguish the sound signature of one vessel, one submarine as against another. So the wolf's call was specific to a certain class of Russian submarine. Well, the thing is, I sort of looked it up. And that's what it says was Navy slang. But when you talk about the Russian submarine, that's an interesting thing, too, because the guy with the fantastic hearing, and initially he thought that it was a dead whale or a sick whale on the bottom of the ocean. But then his hearing is telling him that there's propeller, you know, it's like an old submarine with propellers, it's four propellers. So it's not a nuclear submarine. It says, oh, there's something on the bottom. And then through doing, doing studies because later in the show, what they do is because he was smoking some pachalola with his girlfriend, right? It showed up in his blood in his urine when they went to put him on back on the Formidabo, which was the nuclear submarine, right? So they pulled him off because the admiral said, no way, you're going to be on there. So he finds out, he goes, he goes into his supervisor's computer, he hacks into it. And then he goes into archives and finds out that that's an old Russian submarine. Now, knowing Soviet Union like I do, right? Black Market, one of the crooked Soviet admirals, had went and sold this to the jihadists, right? In Syria. So the submarine located the French submarines, they were on the bottom, they were, you know, doing their sonar going up. And then they got in touch with Iranian, some Iranians who have put a helicopter to try to, you know, bomb from the top of the ocean. Yeah, depth charges, depth charges. Depth charges to kill this French submarine, right? So it's so much intrigue here, right? And then eventually, they find out that, I forgot the name of it, Tartus or something, the name of the old Soviet submarine, right? That's now in the hands of the jihadists, right? Working in connection with the Iranians, you know, who this whole thing gets really interesting, right? Now, I don't want to get too far ahead, but the thing is, you have a missile coming from what seems to be Russia heading to France, nuclear, it seems to be a nuclear missile that's going to bomb France, right? Because this is what the French military thought. So they set up the Formidable, with the nuclear warhead, to send it to Russia. This is what happens when you have cold war, like we have again now. And as I said before the show, Putin is not going to back down, he's gung-ho, he thinks this is Russia's glory and his security. So we're talking about a very similar situation as what could conceivably happen now. You have a extensively a nuclear mission missile with a warhead coming from Russia to France. So the French send a nuclear warhead with Grand Champ, which is on the Formidable, he's the head guy on the Formidable, to send it to Russia, right? But then the guy with the good hearing says, you know, he's listening to the missile, he says, doesn't sound right, doesn't have a nuclear missile, it's just a missile without a nuclear warhead. So the al-Qaeda is trying to create war between Russia and Europe, right? The West, right? Just like they did 9-11 bastards, you know? So bottom line is, this is the whole plot of this movie. So then what you've got to do is chartain, right? He breaks into, he gets himself onto the, on the Titan, which is the ship that's like a escort ship, right? And senior moment, I forget. Yeah, so to try to get this Grand Champ, who used to be his supervising, you know, the head of the ship, he's now on the Formidable because he got, he got, you know, the advancement, he got it promoted, right? And they're trying to convince Sir Grand Champ to stop the missile, but... Wait, wait, you're going so fast, you know? This is probably an example of a movie you have to watch more than once. You caught a lot of detail that I didn't catch. Suffice to say, it's very tense, it's very high-tech, you know, and that's one of the surprising things about the movie, that the French are so advanced. And that, you know, they had to have permission, the filmmaker had to have permission to get on not one, but two nuclear, I mean, yeah, two French subs and show us the control room, show us the sonar, the radar, all the displays, show us how they moved around, how they dealt with it, and show us their, I don't know if it was accurate or not, but they showed us their nuclear systems. Okay, but let me interrupt to say that what was happening, what was happening? I like that, when you do that, Jay, that's good, you could be in line. What was happening was that it was a provocation, that there really was no missile heading for France. They, whoever set that off, I guess it was, you know, the Isis or somebody, tried to provoke a war. And by that time, however, the Formidab had already started going through its countdown, and they had turned the keys on a missile into Russia. So now there was going to be an attack on Russia, and it was on the final count, and they couldn't stop it. That's part of the Cold War. And once the sequence, we've seen this, once the sequence begins, you worry about the other guy stopping the sequence, so you make the sequence bulletproof, nobody can stop it. So the captain of the Formidab, Bonchamp was his name, Bonchamp, he was unable to stop it, and he really couldn't stop it. So the smaller vessel, the Titan, was charged with somehow getting to him, I think he was in the North Sea at the time, getting to him and stopping him. And if that meant blowing up to avoid a nuclear war, blowing up the pride of the French Navy, that is the Formidab, then blow it up. But the Formidab wasn't taking any wooden nickels, they were dedicated to, you know, achieving their mission and letting this missile fly into Russia. And it gets very tense, and it has all the elements of the submarine Cold War kind of exchange, and it was very credible. The only thing that was a surprise, as I said, is the level of technology in the French submarines, the level of camaraderie in the French submarines, they weren't fooling around, and, you know, the level of sophistication of the exchanges between the French Admiralty and the, you know, between the French elements of the military, you know, who are charged with protecting France and sending a missile to Russia. Now, I don't know if it's true, I tell you, I was going to ask you that question, I don't know if it's based on any true stories, but it certainly had the ring of truth of a submarine, nuclear submarine engagement that we just never got to the press. There's so many things about it that ring true, you wonder. The only thing that is troublesome is that, hey, isn't this an American story, not a French story? Isn't this American Department of Defense, not the French Department of Defense? Precisely. But putting that aside, I think you're right, and it's a very timely movie, even though it was made, I believe, just before COVID, they predicted, if you will, the problems with the Russian attitude and Putin's attitude. He was, you know, in the movie, Russia was determined, and the West saw him as a determined adversary, and it was cold war, for sure, at the time in the context of this movie, it was cold war. And so, right now, as you said, it's very timely, because this could happen. I mean, Putin said in the first week of his invasion, he said he was a nuclear power, he reminded us, well, how would that play out? Would play out something like in this movie, where people begin to rattle their nuclear sabers, and maybe, and here's the thing, maybe they make a mistake, that somebody intervenes into seeds, and does a provocation like in the movie, and before you know it, a mistake turns into a global disaster. That's what we are talking about in this movie, and in my money, it's better than any of the submarine movies that remember being done about the American cold war. This was the French cold war, and it is a very chilling reminder of where we are today. The whole scenario of Finland, Putin has now said that if Finland and Sweden become part of NATO, that's a direct threat to him, direct threat to Russia. So this Ukraine is not stopping at Ukraine. I have my own ideas. You know what Putin is, right? Why provoke him? Because he's not going to all the sanctions is not going to stop him. So we're headed to something like this, you know, Finland, same as in the movie, Syria, with Russia is involved in Syria, with Turkey, right? Iran, Iran is involved here. All the players that are currently in today's world, the problem childs are all involved here. It's a very apropos movie for what we're dealing with today and what we may be dealing with tomorrow. So I mean, I would like to see, hopefully try to lower the tensions with Russia, because I'm afraid, you know, nuclear war, you know, if, I mean, I don't know how you're going to do this. Biden go and talk to Putin, try to, the Australian president went and tried to talk some sense into Putin, you know, but he's adamant, you know, he's adamant that Ukraine, this thing in Ukraine is a threat to Russia economically and militarily. So he's going to, he's not going to back down. So how do we, how do we get out of this? No, you get back to, and I don't know you probably not going to agree with me. Jen Stoltenberg is pushing to expand NATO. He wants to expand NATO and Putin is totally opposed to that, right? So how do you get beyond this kind of, you know, the two of the budding heads? It's worrisome. This movie is right on target because if the guy with the good hearing, right, Chartain, right, if he hadn't been able to get into Gonshom's head at the last moment as Gonshom was dying on that formidable to pull out, to stop the missile, we would have had nuclear, they would have been nuclear war from France and Russia would have been United States would have been involved, would have been World War three, maybe destroy the whole world, you know? So this is a very, very good movie for now. And there's no redeeming Hollywood in there. The only guy who survives between the two submarines is the guy with the hearing, right? And he loses his hearing. He loses his hearing. Very ironic. How do these writers think these things up? I mean, the key point was this guy, this guy's hearing was the whole plot was based on a guy's hearing. And at the last moment in the movie, he becomes deaf, you know, I can't even talk to his beautiful girlfriend anymore. I mean, these writers, it's brilliant. I mean, to think that this was the whole thing. And then, you know, they saw the blood coming out of his ears. So it's, as I said, at the beginning, this had me at the edge of my seats. My wife said, how come you didn't fall asleep? I said, how can I fall asleep with a movie like this? Let's talk about the the juncture, the intersection between the entertainment, because I guess this is not a real story. This is not based on a real story. It's written as if it were, but it is not. So what you have is movies like this, which, you know, pretend to track on the elements of the reality in Ukraine and in Europe, but but are only toying with us, giving us entertainment. And we watch we glued to the tube because we think that somehow this is going to teach us something about those elements about what's going on in Europe. But, you know, frankly, it's sometimes it's hard in our in our world of consciousness or sometimes not so conscious to define to distinguish between the entertainment, which is pretty serious stuff, and the reality, flip the channel, just flip the channel over, and you get Ukraine. And you get, you know, Russia talking about nuclear weapons and chemical weapons and biological weapons and all that. And so you know, it's just a matter of a digital turn from one channel to another. And it's almost like they blend together. It's almost like, you know, you've got to sort of separate them in your mind. You got to be careful not to let one influence the other. This this French movie, The Wolf's Call, it could make you think maybe subconsciously make you think that we are there already, that we are in a cold water with nuclear weapons at the nations and the and the military and the navies of Europe are capable of being provoked, capable of being fooled and are ready to launch nuclear weapons or not. And this is what they think about and do and and this is probably true for the US, except we don't think about it so much because I think we can make the distinction easier somehow between the art and the reality. But this movie somehow allows the two to touch each other. Yes. And then you say, are we in a nuclear confrontation now? Are we in a cold war, which is a nuclear war? Is Russia that crazy? Are the French, you know, that determined? Is the technology that good or bad as the case may be? It's not clear. And I and I think this is kind of a recipe. And I've often referred to the Guns of August, a great historical report of the origins of World War One by Barbara Tuckman, a great historian where, you know, you see elements or the winds of war series on television back in the eighties with Robert Mitchum and Ali McGraw, if you remember that. The point is, you see these elements in the in the art or in the reality, in the case of Barbara Tuckman, and you try to track on them and you say, my goodness gracious, we are on a pathway to war. And it's what you were saying before, when you take all this together and you look at these elements and you compare it against what might be. And even the, you know, when they call it the fictional value of some of these movies, you say, well, wait a minute, we really are on a pathway to war. And it's all a matter of tripping the wrong switches. And having a switch automatically trip another switch. And before you know it, all the switches are tripped. And the worst imaginable result can happen. And madmen, as well as automated machines, are determining the future of humanity. Yes. And you could easily say that right now, George. Precisely what you're saying. That is so true. You know, I just to get on the side, I remember Rod Serling, there was one of his shows, you know, the Twilight Zone, how there was a something circling the earth, you know, and then another missile, another one of those, the two came together. And the mission was to one was to kill radiation or some kind of poisons. And the other one said, you know, for man and the two came together and the mission became kill, kill human beings, you know, eradicate human beings. So bottom line is machines, they don't have any mind of their own, they can make mistakes. And if you have somebody crazy, you know, who who's paranoid, right, a human being, then you like Putin is feeling right now, you know, that you just can lead to what you're saying. You know, so it's art, it's fiction, but it was done in 2019. It's much more apropos now in 2022 with where we're going with Ukraine. I mean, this is, this is what I'm worried. I'm this is ominous. I mean, you know, this is an ominous situation. I mean, I don't know where this is going to go. I would hope that the UN or someone can try to sit these people down, that, you know, Stoltenberg and Putin sit them in front of a table and say, you know, let's try to find some common ground here. You know, there's no common ground. He's crazy. He's a doctor. No. And he's got his hand on the nuclear button. And he's trying to use that to rule the world. And he is effectively ruling the world. He's got them terrified in Europe. Although, you know, what strikes me, and this is another movie that you and I have talked about is that don't look up movie. While these threatening existential threats are all over us, while we're facing the possibility of, you know, a total disaster, a global disaster, you turn the channel one more notch and you get a soccer game where nobody in the stadium knows about what's going on in Ukraine. And you turn the channel one more time and you get, you know, some kind of party thing or something that is absolutely oblivious to the reality. And so, and people watch that. So I guess what I'm saying is the media, the television does not give us an accurate reflection of what is really going on. Even the news does not give us an accurate reflection. So somehow it's blurred by the entertainment aspect. It's blurred by the way the media reports it. It's blurred by the soccer game where people don't care. And it just feels so much like don't look up to me where people are oblivious to the reality. So true. You know, I'm on social media and I get into little insignificant kind of stuff. You know, who's kissing their dog and people, that's what people react to and what's going on in the world and serious stuff. As you said, a lot of people are not tuned into this at all. They're just oblivious to it. A lot of people in Europe are not tuned in. We've had a number of talk shows with people who are tuned in and I asked them, are you friends and compatriots? Are they tuned in? They said, no. They'd rather go to a soccer game. And so I'm a little worried about that. The leadership though, the ones who create the French Navy and the French nuclear Navy, they make those decisions, they're decisions. So the future of the world will be turned by only a few people, not by a lot, not by most of us. We just, we're here for the ride and we can't do much about it. And that's the really frightening thing about Putin. He's one person doing his strategy. And on the other side, the fence, these democratic, relatively speaking democratic countries that have trouble getting consensus and his genocide tends to bring them together. But at the same time, they have issues, other political issues, which tend to fragment them. So they may not be as focused as he is. And he knows that. So his threats of nuclear war, of biological war, of chemical war are terrifying. Because they won't know how to respond. Even Biden, he says, well, we have evidence, we have intelligence to suggest that there's going to be, there is already chemical weapons being deployed in eastern Ukraine. Okay, what are you going to do about it? You're going to do your own? What are you going to do? Is that going to heighten your willingness to engage, to put troops on the ground or planes in the air? No, we'll just report it to you. We'll give you the bad news. That's why I don't know how this is going to work out, but I don't see it working out very well. And indeed in the movie, it didn't work out very well. Well, nuclear holocaust was avoided. Yes, definitely. But at the price of many lives. Yes. And that's the most interesting part. It does show you that the national interest in that particular movie was far greater than the interest of any of the characters. Exactly. But I mean, that turned out pretty good. But the situation now, I mean, he's got the button, the red button for nuclear war, and we do too. So what happens if we start with nuclear war? He's not going to back down. Just listen to what he's saying. He had that rally. I mean, from his perspective, as distorted as it is, this is Russia's glory and Russian's economic and military security that he's fighting for in Ukraine. And he's killed all those 10,000 people in Maripole or wherever. It's brutal. Maripole. So how good a movie is this? We've given context and I'm happy we're able to do that. I appreciate your thoughts on it. But as a movie, as a review of a movie, what do you give it? All those things considered? I give it a nine because a little bit of, like you said, it's pulling us into a scenario that we're really not there yet, but we may be soon. So I'll give it a nine. Are you diminishing the rating for it because of that? I mean, what about, you know, for example, I thought the movie was well made. The production values were very high. The tension, as you said, was very high. The exposure to new things, new ideas, new technologies, things we didn't ever think about before in terms of the French seeing it through the French lens, seeing it as the Wolf's call and understanding about what goes on in the control room. You know, I covered the Hemimaru issue from PBS. I was a PBS reporter on the news hour. And I covered the Court of Inquiry proceedings that investigated that. And I'll tell you, I learned a lot about control rooms in nuclear submarines. In fact, we had a tour of the confess really quite something. I consider that a high point in my own, you know, journalistic life to go on a nuclear submarine. It was the sister submarines, the Cheyenne in Pearl Harbor and stand there in the control room and understand what every device was about. And look into the compartment where, you know, they had the nuclear reactor. I mean, that was an incredible experience. And this movie, very few people have had that experience. This movie gives you that kind of introduction to the devices and the technology and the procedures that you see in a French nuclear submarine. And I'll tell you, I learned, I thought I knew at least from my experience with the Greenville incident, but this went further. So I was happy to see that. So on the technical level, on the interest level, on the whole French lens of it, I would give it a 10. That's me. But I agree with you that in the world of movies and the connection of movies and reality, maybe it should be reduced a little because it's so scary. Yeah, you know, the whole thing about the guy with the hearing, you know, and then he loses his hearing, that sort of left me a little, you know. That's true. That's not fictitious. I know that's what happens when you have to go pop, you know, to the different from, you know, you lose your hearing because of the difference. No, I don't mean that part. I mean, the idea, you put a headset on one of those fellas. And yes, they have a certain technology that can look at it. I mean, they can look at the waveforms. But it takes hearing to distinguish the waveforms that are similar. It's not only, you know, the waveform identification, maybe through AI, that distinguishes one kind of, you know, propeller propeller system from another. It's the individual. And I think that's a true fact. I think if you were in a nuclear submarine right now, there'd be somebody just like him. I think that was a reality. That's my guess. Yeah, I'm not questioning that. I'm just questioning the whole scenario where the guy who's got the amazing hearing gets his ears pop, you know, that whole thing of losing his... Well, more than that though, George. I mean, he was down at, you know, at some depth, probably, you know, five, six, seven hundred. Who knows how many feet. That's real, yeah. And yeah. And he was the only one that got out. Yeah. And he didn't have equipment. He was not prepared to surface slowly, which you would have to do very slowly in order to avoid the bends. So it wasn't only he popped his ears. I think, you know, I think it's a real risk of death by way of the bends. And that was, I don't think that was completely accurate. If he came out of a torpedo tube or whatever at that depth and went to the surface, it would be more serious than just his ears. Right. Anyway, that's Dr. Fidel speaking to you, George. You're more familiar with the military kind of stuff. I haven't been in that situation, I'll tell you. But let's talk about the next one. The next one's coming up. The next one, the next one is going to be the promise. Yes. What do you know about the promise? I saw it a few years ago. Right. There's some pluses and minuses. You know, they took a real situation and they turned it into, you know, this sort of like a fairy tale thing of romance and stuff like that. Some of the realities of Musadah were not exactly, you know, right. So a lot of the reviewers were saying that this was too, there was too much frivolity in this. But the key point, Jay, is what I mentioned, and you said it was because the Turks don't want to have a bad mark on them, right, the Turkish government, is that a lot of that, there was a movement of mostly Turkish men who got on and downgraded on rotten tomatoes, what is it, rotten tomatoes and other Sandango and things like that without even seeing the movie. I mean, here I am. It was political. The movement cleared that there was a genocide, that 1.5 million Armenians were murdered in 1914 or so, and intentionally, willfully and for no good reason at all. And that the Turkish government has never owned up to it, even till now. It's 100 years ago. So we should cover the movie next time. It has a certain reality to it. It is intended to be, you know, a document, not a documentary, but a docudrama. I would say they take certain liberties, but the general principle of the Armenian genocide is there, and I think they cover a lot of things that we're seeing. There was revolutionary activity to an extent, but they basically cleaned out everybody. And this time I'm going to get into my family, who are very much Ottoman in the economy, industrialists, and they also got killed, and they were totally loyal to the Sultan. It's okay. Well, good. That'll be a valuable perspective. That's going to be what we're going to talk about. But thank you, George. George Mason, the movie show covering these very interesting movies and connecting them up. Thank you so much, George. Thank you, Jay. Take care. Aloha. Aloha. Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.