The 5 Best Submarine Movies Based on True Stories, Ranked

The best submarine movies are often made with help from specialists who can advise on everything from naval combat tactics to the engineering of the vessels themselves. That research tends to show on screen. When a film makes you feel trapped beneath the ocean alongside its crew, there is a good chance the filmmakers understood the technical details as well as the dramatic stakes.

Of course, historical accuracy alone cannot save a dull movie. Some directors become so focused on honoring real events that they lose sight of the need to build a compelling story. This ranking, therefore, focuses on critically admired submarine movies based on true stories — films that combine factual inspiration with enough tension and entertainment value to keep audiences invested.

The films are presented from the lowest to the highest Letterboxd rating. In several cases, movies that take substantial liberties with history have been received more warmly than productions that aim for complete authenticity. Every title ranks well above average, although some remain more controversial than others. We have examined the numbers and the reasons behind those differing responses as we count down the five best submarine movies based on true events.

If you are still in the mood for more stories from beneath the waves, visit our selection of the five greatest submarine movies ever made after finishing this list.

Years before making “The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow moved away from larger-than-life action spectacles to direct this fact-based Cold War thriller. “K-19: The Widowmaker” takes place in 1961, at a time when the Soviet Union’s nuclear ambitions led the United States to position nuclear submarines near Moscow and Leningrad. The Soviets answered by sending their first nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine toward Greenland, placing it close enough to threaten New York and Washington, D.C.

The submarine had been built at speed in an effort to match American military power, and the rushed construction reportedly resulted in deaths among the workers. Testing also exposed serious system failures and flooding. Once the vessel entered service, its crew faced an even greater crisis when a reactor coolant leak forced them to make repairs while exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. With communications to Moscow cut off, the sailors had little hope of receiving help.

It is an extraordinary true story, but Bigelow’s film does not entirely capture its full weight. The movie earned generally positive yet mixed reactions on Letterboxd, while its narrowly fresh Rotten Tomatoes score was helped by strong endorsements from critics including Roger Ebert. The major events remain in place, but the crew is represented through fictionalized composite characters, and several of the harsher realities were softened for mainstream audiences.

The film can be a punishing watch, but the decision to call the submarine “The Widowmaker” — when its real nickname was “Hiroshima” — hints at how much darker the historical record was. Even so, the movie works as an entertaining old-school drama, particularly with Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson portraying the commanding and executive officers. It may not be definitive history, but it remains a solid Sunday afternoon submarine thriller.

The poor box-office performance of “Kursk” is understandable, especially given that the film earned considerably less than its reported $40 million budget. The 2000 submarine disaster left no survivors, and Thomas Vinterberg’s movie follows the institutional failures surrounding the deaths of all 118 sailors aboard. Much of its emotional force comes from the desperate efforts of the men’s families and foreign naval teams, who try to intervene as the crisis unfolds.

Although the characters are composites, the film presents the disaster and its immediate aftermath with considerable fidelity. A dummy torpedo began leaking high-test peroxide, causing an initial explosion and a fire that eventually set off the submarine’s remaining torpedoes. The “Kursk” story is structured as a procedural account of the delay between the first blast and the wider realization that the crew required urgent rescue. Journalist Robert Moore, whose book inspired the film, and former Royal Navy commodore David Russell — portrayed by Colin Firth — served as advisers to strengthen its technical realism.

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That approach is effective for much of the film, but one major omission is impossible to ignore: Vladimir Putin’s absence. The disaster became the first major scandal of his presidency, and he remained on vacation for several days while the rescue effort descended into chaos. By removing this crucial political obstacle, Robert Rodat’s screenplay leaves out an important part of the real story. The result is a tense and deeply uncomfortable portrayal of events inside the submarine, but the incomplete account of what happened on land keeps “Kursk” from reaching its full potential — a judgment reflected in its modest 3.2 Letterboxd average.

Jonathan Mostow’s “U-571” is easily the least historically accurate film in this ranking. Its changes were so significant that they prompted a minor diplomatic controversy between the United Kingdom and the United States. The movie takes a successful British naval operation from World War II and reimagines it as a victory for the U.S. Navy.

The real mission involved British sailors risking their lives to capture a damaged German U-boat and recover the Enigma code machine on board. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair condemned the film as an “affront” to the veterans’ legacy, while the movie placed Matthew McConaughey and Bill Paxton at the center of an achievement that was not American. Co-writer David Ayer later acknowledged that the history had been altered to make the story more appealing to U.S. audiences, adding that he would not make the same choice again.

Despite those glaring inaccuracies, Letterboxd users have largely separated the movie’s historical distortions from its effectiveness as entertainment. “U-571” delivers the expected combination of naval procedure, strategic maneuvering and claustrophobic action, opening with a ferocious set piece and sustaining that suspense throughout. Any praise for the film must come with a major qualification about its treatment of history, but judged purely as a Hollywood submarine thriller, it remains remarkably entertaining.

Based on British Royal Navy commander C. E. T. Warren’s nonfiction book of the same name, “Above us the Waves” recounts two successive naval missions targeting the Tirpitz, a German battleship concealed within Norway’s fjords. Producer William MacQuitty was fascinated by submarines and secured the adaptation rights before Warren’s book became a bestseller. An experienced diver himself, MacQuitty took a hands-on role in preserving technical and historical accuracy during the film’s underwater sequences.

It’s an approach that makes it easy to overlook the minor creative changes (such as renaming a torpedo carrier), as screenwriter Robin Estridge and director Ralph Thomas largely follow the source material’s arc, right down to documenting the many missteps and errors made on the mission. The procedural structure is catnip for naval thriller fans, and struck a chord with British audiences who were reliably making homegrown WWII blockbusters into hits (“The Dam Busters” was the UK’s highest grossing movie in 1955).

Unfortunately, it has since become the most obscure title on this list, with only 481 total user ratings on Letterboxd. It deserves to be rediscovered by any fan of the genre. As reviews on the site point out, the slow-burning, process-driven narrative explodes into a tense and claustrophobic second half, set entirely within the confines of the tin can floating in the North Sea. It’s as stripped down as a submarine movie can get but no less thrilling for it, especially considering how faithful it remains to the facts.

The number one on this list was never in doubt, with an average rating on Letterboxd an entire star higher than second place. “Das Boot” boasts an impressive 4.3 compared to the 3.3 of “Above Us the Waves.” Director Wolfgang Petersen’s anti-war epic needs little introduction. It’s a gold standard not just for submarine movies, but those adapted from real events, taking journalist Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s semi-autobiographical novel as the starting point for a more authoritative account of life below the surface. 

If you do need further assurance of why this is considered the best in the genre, look at Petersen’s painstaking attention to period detail in building replicas of the commissioned submarines, with the assistance of real crew members to ensure accuracy when it comes to capturing life on board these claustrophobic cans. It was the most expensive German movie in history at that time, and every last deutsche mark went to good use.

Of course, “Das Boot” resonates far beyond the dedicated audience of submarine obsessives, and has been routinely commended for generations for its grueling depiction of life at war, with servicemen low on supplies and morale before the biggest existential threats to their lives make themselves known. This is the reason many still proclaim it to be the most realistic submarine movie ever made. Even outside of wartime, veterans can recognize the truth in its depiction of the monotonous routine while stuck inside, even without the tension ratcheted up to such uncomfortable levels. It’s one of the most realistic accounts of the lives of servicemen during WWII, not just one of the truest to reality submarine films.