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Review by Frank Wilkins
In 1961, the Soviet Union built a nuclear powered submarine capable of launching missiles equipped with nuclear warheads and sent it on its maiden voyage. The mission was to perform an emergency surfacing maneuver, launch a test missile and then dive back into the depths of the North Atlantic before going on routine patrol off the Eastern seaboard of the United States. The launching of the missile was not to be a secret hidden from the Americans. It was to be a message that The Soviet Union has the ability to strike with nuclear force from anywhere in the world. The submarine was known as K19.

Shortly after the successful launch of the test missile, tragedy struck the Hotel Class II submarine. K19's nuclear reactor developed a leak in its cooling unit, sending its core temperatures quickly rising to points of unknown danger. The crew of K19 performed a radical, but successful repair job on the sub's reactor, but at a costly price. Several of the crewmembers died within days of the accident and 20 more died in years to come from their exposure to radiation.

The tragedy of K19 is only one in a series of Russian submarine accidents dating back to 1961, some of which have involved nuclear weapons that have either been inadvertently jettisoned (without exploding, I might add) or sank with their ship. In 2000 The Kursk suffered an explosion and sank in the Berents Sea. In 1986 a Soviet sub carrying at least 32 nuclear warheads sank off Bermuda, and in 1977 a Soviet submarine accidently jettisoned a nuclear warhead that was later recovered. Another Russian sub sank off Norway in 1989 and continues, according to Norwegian officials, to leak radiation from its nuclear reactor and nuclear tipped torpedoes.

In addition to these dangers, dozens of decommissioned nuclear-powered submarines lie in Russian ports rusting and abandoned. Lack of money prevents the Russians from taking steps to prevent potential radiation disasters.

I mention these tragedies because K19: The Widowmaker, is more useful as a documentary of history than it is a movie made for its entertainment value. Of course it's been run through the Hollywood glamour machine and is leaking fiction like nobody's business, but it serves a better purpose as a vehicle describing yet one more event in a long history of nuclear build-up between the super powers. Would the public ever have known about this event had it not been made into a movie? Would it have mattered if we never had known about this event? Although a much worse movie than this one, Woo's Windtalkers served very much the same purpose, bringing attention to a forgotten or little known event in World history.

Captain Alexi Vostrikov (Harrison Ford), a Soviet State connected, submarine officer is ordered to take over the command of K19 from its current captain Mikhail Polenin (Liam Neeson) who unsuccessfully takes the sub through its prelaunch drills. The ensuing bad blood between the two officers seems a bit contrived, predictable and over-dramatized but it's what we've come to expect from Hollywood. Captain Polenin is the father figure to the men gaining their loyalty above Vostrikov who is the hard-nosed drill sergeant type who runs them ruthlessly through their emergency drills.

I was, at first, a bit skeptical of being able to accept Ford as a Russian officer, but somehow he had the look and his accent did not come off as a distraction. I was, however, a bit underwhelmed at the script for morphing Ford's character from the authoritarian State figure to an almost groveling sympathetic savior at the end. Neeson is strong however as Polenin. I always knew he had a unique look but I never realized he could look so "Russian". The most notable performance however comes from Peter Sarsgaard as Vadim, the nuclear reactor technician who goes from coward to hero. I am quickly becoming a fan of his after this performance as well as in The Salton Sea and Boys Don't Cry.

While I noticed some inaccuracies of the depiction of submarine life and it seemed to run a bit too much on the Hollywood side of a true-life account, the message came through with a powerful significance. Much like the tragedy faced by the American astronauts depicted in Howard's Apollo 13, this story is about survival and courage and what humans can do when faced with life or death situations. The submarine is a huge and powerful instrument of war yet it was the crewmembers working together with their hands and minds, trying to avoid a nuclear disaster that would not only kill everyone on board, but could quite possibly launch the world into nuclear chaos.

It's hard not to compare K19: The Widowmaker to other submarine movies. While successful at bringing to the public's attention the story of these brave Russian soldiers, I won't put K19 in the class of Das Boot, The Abyss, or even The Hunt for Red October. While using some very cool David Fincher type camera moves, the suspense just doesn't seem all that intense and I didn't get that overwhelming sense of claustrophobic energy brought about by most sub movies.

The DVD is a great experience however. The main menu is quite impressive with motion graphics and Soviet Empire era military music playing over an audio bed of underwater submarine sounds. There is a lot of darkness in K19, but the DVD transfer holds up well with no noticeable artifacting in the blacks. There is a great making-of featurette that includes an interesting segment covering the conversion of a Juliet class submarine into K19, a Hotel II Class sub for the production of the movie.

Frank Wilkins


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