I'm there. I'm glad it's made. I always wanted more. Hopeful it will be good.
A couple of things in the trailer made me think of Patriot Games. It also made me wish we'd had more Chris Pine movies; Shadow Recruit was, once it got past the prologues, fairly good.
Without Remorse was mediocre and Michael B. Jordan costs more now. Of course on streaming time gap means nothing.
Easily the second best Jack Ryan movie after Red October. Granted, that's not really much of a competition.
I give Sum a slight edge over Shadow Recruit. Both have rocky openings, though — Sum has a terrible introduction of Affleck's Ryan, while Shadow opens with a lot of backstory.
After that, for me it's Clear then Patriot.
It's a strange set of movies. I'm not sure Jack Ryan really works as a movie hero lead. Red October works best because he's a co-lead with Ramius.
For me, it has to do with the Ryan novels just don't translate well to movies. I've seen Clancy's writing style described as "mosaic style" which I guess it sort of is. In that he often has a lot of side stories and subplots in addition to the main narrative which you really can't pull off in a movie. Red October does have a central narrative which works well enough without the side stories and subplots, which I believe is a factor in why that worked out best out of the movies which were adaptations of novels. The others, need those side stories in order to contribute to a cohesive narrative. The results if you leave them out, either leads to a rather confusing and disjointed movie, like Sum of All Fears, or they attempt to include some of them only it just makes things look rushed, like Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. Shadow Recruit told an original story and as a result comes off a better constructed movie.
Ironically, the Ryan TV series chose to do original stories where the fact a streaming TV season can lend itself to mosaic story telling better means they could have done a better job adapting the novels than the movies ever could. Indeed, there are aspects of the first season which feel as though they could have happened in a Clancy novel, such as the subplot about the drone pilot developing conflicted feelings about his job.
Granted, Clancy's prose style had its own problems which became more and more evident in his later novels, but that's another matter entirely.
You raise a good point, and the "mosaic style" might be why they couldn't crack the script for Ford's third film, Cardinal of the Kremlin, in the mid-90s. I like Cardinal, the novel, but its plot is all over the map. I know William Shatner was attached to the film as the Russian general -- he talked about it openly at the time -- so there's almost certainly some scripts laying around somewhere.
Agreed on the "mosaic style" though I liked most of the films (Clear was probably my least though)
Just trying to imagine if they did Red Storm Rising (Not Ryan though) as a 2 to 3 hour movie - Very trimmed down.
Just trying to imagine if they did Red Storm Rising (Not Ryan though) as a 2 to 3 hour movie - Very trimmed down.
In 2002, Putnam reissued Clancy's novels with new covers and accidentally put "A Jack Ryan Novel" on the cover of Red Storm Rising.
I had the TSR board game based on the novel. It may still be around somewhere.
Red Storm might work best as a six hour miniseries. There's no single plot in it to really focus on. But we're also forty years beyond its world; I'm not sure what kind of market exists for an alternative history drama about war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Probably not enough to justify making it.
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