In 1984, Soviet submarine Captain First Rank Marko Ramius (Connery) commands Red October, a new Typhoon-class nuclear sub featuring a caterpillar drive, rendering it undetectable to passive sonar. Ramius leaves port on orders to conduct exercises with the V.K. Konovalov, commanded by his former student Captain Tupolev (Skarsgård). Once at sea, Ramius kills political officer Ivan Putin (Firth), and commands the crew to head toward America's east coast to conduct missile drills.
In 1988 a US ballistic missile submarine, the USS Montana, sinks near the edge of the Cayman Trough after an accidental encounter with an unidentified submerged object. As Soviet ships and submarines head toward the area in an attempt to salvage the sub, and with a hurricane moving in, the Americans decide that the quickest way to mount a rescue is to insert a SEAL team onto the Deep Core, a privately owned, experimental underwater oil drilling platform, located 1,700 feet (518 meters) below sea level, which will serve as their base of operations. The designer of the platform, Dr. Lindsey Brigman, insists on accompanying the SEAL team, even though her estranged husband, Virgil "Bud" Brigman, is currently serving as the platform's foreman.
DeepStar Six is a prototype deep-sea colony funded by the United States Navy with a collection of 11 military and civilian crew members in the last week of their six month tour. The brainchild of Dr. Van Gelder, the base is allowed to conduct its experiment on underwater colonization provided that he also oversee the installation of a nuclear missile storage platform nearby. Nearing the last days of his deadline, Van Gelder's plans are threatened when geologist Burciaga (Elya Baskin) discovers a massive cavern system at the installation site. Van Gelder orders the submarine crew to use depth charges to collapse the cavern, to the dismay of Dr. Scarpelli (Nia Peeples), who wants to preserve the cavern to study the potentially primordial ecosystem she suspects lies inside.
Martin, CEO of Tri-Oceanic Corp, hires geologist Steven Beck to command an undersea mining operation for six months. While working outside their deep sea station in a pressure suit, one of the crewmembers, Sixpack, discovers a Soviet shipwreck, Leviathan.
Two children, Jacques Mayol (Jean-Marc Barr) and Enzo Molinari (Jean Reno), have grown up on the Greek island of Amorgos in the 1960s. They challenge each other to collect a coin on the sea floor and Jacques loses. Later Jacques' father — who harvests shellfish from the seabed using a pump-supplied air hose and helmet — goes diving for shellfish. His breathing apparatus and rope gets caught and punctured by rocks on the reef and weighed down by water, he drowns. Jacques and Enzo can do nothing but watch in horror as he is killed.
Opening from his point of view, a murderer looks around the city of Amsterdam at night through the canals the city is famous for. He sneaks into a Chinese restaurant's backdoor and steals a butcher knife while the cooks weren't looking. The killer finds his first victim in a local prostitute, who after refusing advances from a cab driver, gets thrown out of the cab. A baglady watches from a distance as the killer plunges the knife into the hooker and drags her back into the water. The next morning, a tour boat on the canal collides with the body of the prostitute, who has been hung on one of the small bridges. As the tourists scream, the body drags on the top of the boat until an opening shows her bloodied body and face.
Set in San Francisco, California, down-on-his-luck Naval aviator Lt. Tuck Pendleton (Quaid) resigns his commission and volunteers for a secret miniaturization experiment. He is placed in a submersible pod and both are shrunk to microscopic size. They are transferred into a syringe to be injected into a rabbit, but the lab is attacked by a rival organization, led by scientist Dr. Margaret Canker (Fiona Lewis), that plans to seize the experiment and steal the miniaturization technology.
Wet Gold is the story of Laura, a young café waitress dreaming of owning a piano. Laura stumbles across Sampson, a drunk elderly man who fills her with exciting stories of a boat that sank with millions of dollars in gold. Although Chris Barnes, Laura's boyfriend, keeps telling her that Sampson's stories are all false, Sampson makes her believe that they are indeed true. Laura takes Sampson to a library, where she finds on old a newspaper article that matches up the events he described.
After MI6 agent James Bond, 007, fails a routine training exercise, his superior, M, orders Bond to a health clinic outside London to get back into shape. While there, Bond witnesses a mysterious nurse named Fatima Blush giving a sadomasochistic beating to a patient in a nearby room. The man's face is bandaged and after Blush finishes her beating, Bond sees the patient using a machine which scans his eye. Bond is seen by Blush and an attempt is subsequently made to kill him in the clinic gym, but Bond manages to defeat the assassin.
The story is told from the viewpoint of Lt. Werner (Herbert Grönemeyer), who has been assigned as a war correspondent on the German submarine U-96 in October 1941. He meets its captain (Jürgen Prochnow), chief engineer (Klaus Wennemann), and the crew in a French nightclub. Thomsen (Otto Sander), another captain, gives a crude drunken speech to celebrate his Ritterkreuz award, in which he openly mocks not only Winston Churchill but implicitly Adolf Hitler as well.
Gibbie Gibson (Donald Pleasence) has discovered a World War II-era plane wreck in the mountains of New Zealand. When his discovery gets around town, Gibson, his daughter Sally (Lesley Ann Warren), and his lodger Barney Whitaker (Ken Wahl) find trouble from a group of treasure hunters led by a Mister Theo Brown (George Peppard), who are intent on finding the cache of money they believe is on the wreck.
The British spy boat St Georges, which holds the Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator (ATAC), the system used by the Ministry of Defence to communicate with and co-ordinate the Royal Navy's fleet of Polaris submarines, is sunk after accidentally trawling an old naval mine in the Ionian Sea. MI6 agent James Bond, code name "007", is ordered by the Minister of Defence, Sir Frederick Gray and MI6 Chief of Staff, Bill Tanner, to retrieve the ATAC before the Soviets, as the transmitter could order attacks by the submarines' Polaris ballistic missiles.
Mike Di Donato, an Italian-American man with a mysterious past, leads a solitary life in an anonymous sea island. His unusual work is the hunting of sharks, from which his partner derives handicrafts for the local market.
British and Soviet ballistic-missile submarines mysteriously disappear. James Bond—MI6 agent 007—is summoned to investigate. On the way he escapes an ambush by Soviet agents in Austria, killing one during a downhill ski chase, and escaping via a Union Flag parachute. Bond learns that the plans for a highly advanced submarine tracking system are on the market in Egypt. There, he encounters Major Anya Amasova—KGB agent Triple X—his rival for the plans. They travel across Egypt together, tracking the microfilm plans, meeting Jaws—a tall assassin with steel teeth—along the way. Bond and Amasova later team up through a truce agreed by their respective superiors and identify the person responsible for the thefts as the shipping tycoon, scientist, and anarchist Karl Stromberg.