K-19: The Widowmaker review
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When I first heard about this film, well-deserved prior to its overdone untie in 2002, I thought it was going to be an action-crammed mountain climbing movie, à la Eiger Sanction, Cliffhanger or Vertical Limit. Apparently I was thinking of K2, which is the second highest peak in the world, and generally regarded as the most straitening and dangerous of all mountains. Luckily, there are no mountains in this complete, and little did I identify it was actually a “submarine” movie, and still that bit of clearness is not a completely for detail nor respectable description of what K-19: The Widowmaker is remarkably all about.
While 95% of the film is in fact set in the cramped, sweaty quarters of a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine smack dab in the mean of the Coryza Warfare in 1961, this is less a take war dusting than it is a drama about spunk, liable to be and self-sacrifice. If you’re expecting a tense military battle epic, full of depth-charges like U-571 or equal the granddaddy of submariner flicks Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot, you may find yourself watching this one and being momentarily perplexed at the actual absence of onscreen at daggers drawn action.
K-19: The Widowmaker marks the return of big cheese Kathryn Bigelow, a person not afraid to take traditional film scenarios and alter them slight to make them her own (as in Near Dark and Strange Days). She does it again here, winsome real life events and presenting them within the framework of what could keep traditionally been more of a straight-forward war pic, and a substitute alternatively almost isolates the submarine from the be lodged of the life, and slowly unfolds an alarming anecdote that may have brought the in every way closer to World Do battle III than many may have even realized.
Liam Neeson is Polenin, the Captain of the Soviet navy flagship submarine the K-19, well-liked by the crew. When a training training is failed miserably initial in the film, Polenin is demoted to Management Officer status, and replaced by stern tyrant Vostrikov (Harrison Ford). The K-19 is set to leave on bounding main trials in less than a month, and despite Polenin’s protests that the scram is unsafe and will never be ready, Vostrikov is under orders to launch a dummy test guided missile from the sub penny-pinching a NATO base in American waters in order to announce to the world that the Soviets could begin a missile decompose on US sludge, if needed.
Untypical during the era of the faceless enemy in war epics during the 1950s and ’60s, it has change delightful for films to portray “the enemy” as likeable, and Bigelow does that here, filling the sub with a likeable crew of young sailors who are alternatingly fearless, alarmed and undeniably patriotic. Sporadically you dance around the excess of occasionally bad Boris Badenov accents, you realize that the zeal of Vostrikov and the fears of the crew are not strictly Soviet, and that their actions are not sure inevitably by their nation of origin.
This isn’t quite an activity or war sheet, but rather a coat with performance elements work out in a submarine during wartime. The story is compelling, and even the tried and true submarine motion picture elements we’ve seen previously (the really, really acute jump that is considered “risky,” the officer with a gal remote home, the loyal crew) sound palatable here. The film stalls a bit during the final moments, when Bigelow attempts to attach a more deep, formulaic coda to the story that seems in some way forced and out of place.
Leonora Fornicola