Kathryn Bigelow

Like so many military movies, “K-19″ is about a conflict between two strong personalities, but it has no villains as such. With its mesmerizing scenes of the great sub diving to a human-crushing depth of 300 meters, or surfacing through the Arctic ice cap, it’s also a tribute to the marvels of large-scale machinery, so impressive when it works and so devastating when it doesn’t. On one hand, this joins Wolfgang Petersen’s “Das Boot” at the top of a very short list of the best submarine movies ever made. On the other, it’s also a clever and subtle work, not a war film or an anti-war film but a non-war film that’s designed to humanize and complicate viewers’ understanding of Cold War propaganda and the nature of bravery.

“K-19″ is also an old-fashioned Hollywood movie in the best possible sense of that term, the kind that only a handful of filmmakers — Steven Spielberg and Steven Soderbergh, say, along with Bigelow’s ex-husband, James Cameron — still have the power and freedom to create. It allows its big stars, Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson (as the captain and first officer of the stricken sub, respectively), to loom above the rest of the picture like dueling colossi, without losing touch with the escalating dramatic tension or the generously handled ensemble around them. For Bigelow herself, one of the most ambitious and intriguing of Hollywood action-film directors (as well as pretty much the only woman working in the genre), it’s also a triumphant comeback. Best known for the gritty vampire flick “Near Dark” and the sadistic cop-actioner “Blue Steel,” she hasn’t released a major-studio picture since the flawed if distinctive “Strange Days” in 1995.

Perhaps only Bigelow would have had the subversive sensibility — or the sheer balls — for this project: a Hollywood movie set at the height of the Cold War in which every major character is an officer or sailor in the Soviet Navy. No crewcut-sporting Americans show up to save the day or refocus the audience’s attention (in fact, this becomes a plot point in the canny screenplay by Christopher Kyle, from a story by Louis Nowra) and there are essentially no women in the picture. Like Capt. Alexei Vostrikov (Ford), the hardened-steel commander of K-19, we’re stuck in that sub with those men, that treacherous early-’60s Soviet technology and absolutely no way out.

Initially it sounds odd to hear Ford, Neeson and the rest of the cast speaking English with “Russian” accents, but the choice is part of Bigelow’s overall aesthetic strategy, not just bogus Hollywoodism. For one thing, the cast of “K-19″ is intended to simulate the wide range of nationalities and ethnicities found in the Soviet military, and so is drawn from all over the Northern Hemisphere, including the United States and Ireland (in the case of the two stars) and also Russia, Britain and Scandinavia. So having the actors speak a slightly uncomfortable lingua franca is a legitimate decision. More than that, the Slavo-English compels the cast to leave their comfortable 21st-century actor-dude mannerisms behind, drawing them and us materially and psychologically into a different place and time.

Vostrikov, for example, bears little resemblance to any character Harrison Ford has played before, reminding us how good an actor he can be when a director pushes him beyond his customary concerned-American-dad shtick. Vostrikov is every inch a Russian, a military hard man with a philosophical, even fatalistic streak who believes in driving his men — and his untested, nuke-powered submarine — to the edge of exhaustion. As the K-19 disaster unfolds, we learn almost nothing about Vostrikov’s personal life. According to gossip aboard the boat (all submariners call their craft “boats”), he got his appointment by marrying a Politburo member’s niece or daughter, but if it’s true she is never mentioned by name. Bigelow gives us just one momentary scene in Vostrikov’s quarters, where viewers who know a little music and can make out a little Cyrillic will learn that he’s a Beethoven fancier and a Tolstoy reader.

Vostrikov is brought in to command the K-19, the Soviets’ first ballistic nuclear submarine, after a dry-dock exercise goes awry under Mikhail Polenin (Neeson), its beloved captain, and the crew begins to believe that the great boat may be cursed. The navy brass, headed by the forbidding Marshal Zelenstov (Joss Ackland) don’t want to hear about any problems, and in Vostrikov they’ve got the right guy. Well before the boat leaves the port city of Murmansk (Halifax, Nova Scotia, is used as a convincing substitute) we know that Vostrikov has his doubts about the mission, but is not a man who believes in complaining or showing weakness.

If the resulting conflict-friendship drama between Vostrikov and Polenin is standard fare in military films, like most of “K-19″ it is marvelously executed. Neeson has also rarely been better; an actor of tremendous physical presence and charisma, he nonetheless plays Polenin as a withdrawn man locked in internal combat, torn between his sense that he’s the genuine leader of the K-19′s crew and his unwavering loyalty to military protocol.

The K-19′s officer corps also includes a Communist Party official, who’s on hand to show the men propaganda films about the evils of American life: Klan rallies, lynchings, forcible suppression of civil-rights demonstrations, widespread urban and rural poverty. He’s a discomfiting comic presence in the film; the professional navy officers around him can barely stand his pompous moralizing, but his arguments about the hypocrisy of Western materialism strike disturbingly close to the mark. (I’m reminded of a contemporary Russian witticism about the post-Soviet era: “At last we understand. Everything they told us about communism was false. And everything they told us about capitalism was true.”)

For the Kremlin leadership, the K-19′s maiden voyage in the spring and summer of 1961 was a question of survival. In terms of nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union was outgunned 5-to-1 by the U.S., and American nuclear subs were patrolling Russian coastal waters, within easy missile reach of Moscow and Leningrad. Without a credible submarine-based deterrent of their own, the Soviets feared a devastating first strike by the U.S. (and, yes, class, there really were Washington hawks who advocated such a thing). But whatever the level of genuine threat may have been, sending an untested and ill-equipped boat out into the North Atlantic, armed with dangerously unstable weapons of mass destruction, was clearly a reckless decision.

Bigelow and Kyle supply only a little of this background, nor do they attempt to assign blame for what went wrong aboard the K-19 (although Vostrikov, who ultimately became a hero, must carry at least some of the responsibility). The film’s only political agenda is to make us see that the crew of the K-19 were following orders, as military men have always done, that they believed they were on the right side of history opposing a great evil and that they displayed incredible courage in the face of grave peril.

Bigelow’s measured pacing, her long traveling shots through the body of the sub that gradually convey its social and mechanical geography and her large-scale, heroic compositions are strikingly different from anything you see in contemporary Hollywood movies. I suspect she’s trying to channel the grandiose mood and spirit of classic Soviet films her audience has probably never seen, from Eisenstein and Dovzhenko to Aleksandr Askoldov’s “Commissar” and Eldor Urazbayev’s “Trans-Siberian Express.” (No, Blockbuster doesn’t carry those, but your nearest big-city public library might.)

There are admittedly moments when Kyle’s dialogue creaks and groans as much as the K-19′s hull at 300 meters, but most of the film is so exciting you won’t much care. Once Vostrikov has brought the boat crashing upward through the ice and successfully launched a test missile, things start to go wrong. A coolant leak develops in the aft nuclear reactor, which is supervised by Vadim (Peter Sarsgaard, in the movie’s standout supporting role), a young lieutenant fresh from the academy. With the reactor core overheating uncontrollably — and backup systems that either don’t work or were never installed — a meltdown is only hours away. If the core melts through its container, the boat’s thermonuclear warheads could explode, taking out not just the K-19 but the American destroyer shadowing it a mile away. Quite conceivably, this would be the opening shot of a new world war.

A group of crewmen, among them a sleepy-eyed, handsome sailor named Pavel (Christian Camargo), volunteer to enter the sealed reactor chamber — wearing nothing but rubber chemical suits — risking severe radiation exposure to make the difficult repairs. How long can the jury-rigged patch job hold? With its engines crippled and no radio contact with Moscow, will the K-19 crew ever get home? Will they be forced to scuttle their priceless sub or surrender it to the watching Americans? Obviously the world doesn’t blow up in the end, but I shouldn’t say more in deference to those who don’t know the real K-19 story (to which Bigelow and company stick pretty closely).

It would be a grave mistake to view “K-19″ as a pro-Soviet film, although in today’s frightful cultural climate I’m sure some idiot will make that charge. Much of the brilliance of Bigelow’s approach to this material (as in her other films) lies in her appreciation of its ambiguity. As an audience we must acknowledge the brave self-sacrifice of men who believed they were serving the Communist Party and the Soviet state, even though that party and that state had sent them out into the ocean on a poorly insulated pile of smoldering plutonium.

Of course the Hollywood party line is that “K-19″ is nothing more than a good story, but Bigelow is a cannier and trickier filmmaker than that. Not only does she not seek black-and-white moral equations, she actively tries to undermine them. Even in this movie’s few lighter moments, as when we watch these servants of the Evil Empire joyously playing soccer on the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean, it remains a fable about the perils of a Manichaean worldview, the danger that dividing the world into implacable camps of friends and foes leads to the annihilation of both. It’s just as valuable a lesson as it was 40 years ago — and just as devilishly difficult to apply to reality.

So Danish director Janus Metz’s widely acclaimed “Armadillo” (winner of the Critics’ Week prize at Cannes last year) arrives in a crowded field and belongs to a familiar genre: Meet a group of ordinary, likable guys — and then go with them into hell. It isn’t in English and reflects a non-American perspective, which only makes it less likely that it will find any kind of audience here. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s a brilliant work of cinema, a nonfiction film as intense and visceral as any drama, and an emotional and moral experience that feels horrifying and exhilarating at almost the same moment. Metz and cinematographer Lars Skree spent six months in 2009 living with a group of Danish soldiers at Forward Base Armadillo, in the opium-rich province of Helmand in southwestern Afghanistan, where they experienced several firefights with Taliban forces dug in less than a mile away. The filmmakers were fortunate to come back to Europe alive — and what they came back with was a mesmerizing, beautiful and terrifying documentary that can stand among the greatest war movies ever made.

“Armadillo” has provoked something close to a political firestorm in Denmark, a customarily calm social democracy with a smaller population than New York City and greater income equality than any nation in the world. Only a few hundred Danish volunteers have joined the United States-led coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, but war is war, and as the climactic scene in “Armadillo” makes clear, it’s often very ugly indeed. Metz and Skree were on hand to witness a hair-raising battle that ends when a small detachment of Danes ambushes a group of Taliban snipers in a ditch, and let’s be very clear about this: What you see in the film is death, right up close, and everything about it is dreadful.

Whether the Danish soldiers engage in vicious, callous or criminal conduct, as some commentators have suggested, is perhaps a subjective question, or one that looks different to European eyes than American ones. What I saw in “Armadillo” was a group of amped-up young men high on the drug of war who survive a kill-or-be-killed situation, one where moral considerations have all but evaporated. Their behavior is not exemplary but it seems comprehensible, and those of us watching cannot know what we would do in the same situation. This is a cliché that’s applied to war movies way too often, but your political outlook and opinion about the Afghan conflict are pretty much irrelevant to “Armadillo.” It’s a strict cinéma-vérité film with no narration or commentary; war opponents can find plenty of evidence that the whole endeavor is a pointless morass, while those who believe that the Taliban must be defeated, whatever the price, may conclude that these young soldiers and others like them are making a valuable sacrifice and slowly turning the tide.

I guess those questions can never be overlooked, given how much of the Western world’s so-called prestige, not to mention America’s national debt, is tied up in the Afghan conflict. But at the risk of retreating to aesthetics, let me say that Metz and Skree have made a movie that is first and foremost a movie, a sensuous widescreen landscape of helicopters and mist-shrouded groves of trees and agricultural canals and bored, agitated young men who ride motorcycles and watch pornography and risk their lives every day for ambiguous reasons. I assume “Armadillo” was shot in the field on digital video and then blown up to 35mm, but it so magnificently constructed that I became disoriented at certain moments: That isn’t an actor convincingly rendering a man in shock; he’s actually been shot. That isn’t brooding Method acting; that guy has just learned that a mortar shell whose target he selected has killed a little girl.

Every 21st-century war film tries to grapple with the eerie disconnection of modern warfare, whose soldiers return (if they do return) to a comfortable consumer society that seems less than eager to know about what they saw and felt and did. Jeremy Renner’s memorable “lost in the supermarket” scene in “The Hurt Locker” was one version of this, and Metz delivers an intimate, distinctly Nordic response, with the soldiers of his platoon arriving home to a small country that’s so polite and clean and pleasant that it seems as if the grisly deaths we witnessed in that ditch in Helmand province couldn’t have happened in the same universe. “Armadillo” can’t resolve the vicious moral and philosophical conundrums of war in general or this one in particular, but it may do something even more valuable: Whatever you think — or whatever you think you think — it will leave you shocked, gasping, uncertain.

“Armadillo” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, with more cities and DVD release to follow.

Although I have mixed feelings about “The Hurt Locker” itself, and about the cultural-psychological reasons for its ascendancy, Bigelow herself is a genuine and strange cinematic genius who has paid her dues several times over and richly deserves her moment of triumph. (Is “Hurt Locker” her best film? Probably not. Her second-best? Not even sure about that.) I wish producer-screenwriter Mark Boal hadn’t complicated Bigelow’s big moment on the stage of the Kodak Theatre by persistently tugging on her elbow, like a kid in a department store who needed to use the john. That was odd.

Did it take a grueling, ¿Quién es más macho? war thriller for a female director to win a pile of Oscars? I know there are counter-arguments — mainly, there just haven’t been that many Oscar-scale movies made by women — but I kind of think, yeah, it did. This may have more to do with the Academy’s recent preference for “serious,” male-coded film genres than with simplistic sexual discrimination. Hollywood legend Joseph L. Mankiewicz won back-to-back writing and directing Oscars in 1950 and 1951 for “A Letter to Three Wives” and “All About Eve,” but it’s difficult to imagine such female-centric movies garnering those kinds of honors today.

Taking the longer view, this year’s Oscar campaign and its conclusion offered some crucial flashes of insight into how the Academy works in the 21st century, which is a whole lot different from the way it used to work. Although this goes against nearly everything I believe about life on Planet Earth, I have concluded that Academy voters as a group are less cynical and calculated than I thought — but also that there is a conflict or schism between the membership and the needs and desires of the Academy’s leadership, or at least its image-management and P.R. teams.

I exchanged e-mails late on Sunday night with a critical colleague, one who’d made the same misguided assumptions that I had about the inevitable victory of “Avatar,” notwithstanding the accolades heaped upon “Hurt Locker” by every critics’ group and industry trade organization. Our fundamental error, we concluded, lay in believing that after several years of victories by mid-budget Indiewood pictures the Academy’s collective thinking, and voting behavior, would at some point return to “normal.” What we meant by normal, of course, was an ingrained institutional preference for big-budget spectacle. But that old normal is dead, and here’s the new normal: Hollywood’s central trade group doesn’t like its own movies that much.

Allow me to quote an esteemed expert: “One thing that’s become clear is that the film industry feels no confidence about the cultural significance of its own products. Hollywood’s self-appointed division of self-importance, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, passed up the chance to honor one of the most ambitious and successful films the American movie factories have ever made in order to hand out hardware to a mid-budget, semi-independent production made in Jordan without movie stars.”

OK, the expert is not all that esteemed. It’s me, and other than replacing “India” with “Jordan,” that’s taken verbatim from the article I wrote last year about the Oscar victory of “Slumdog Millionaire” and the shunning of “The Dark Knight.” If anything, the contrast is even starker this time around. “Avatar” is, of course, a much bigger hit than TDK, and its use of motion-capture technology and 3-D clearly points toward the Hollywood future. “The Hurt Locker” is a genuine indie production, financed and made entirely outside the studio system, which grossed less than $15 million in the United States.

Comparing different eras of financial and cinematic history is rife with pitfalls, but that clearly makes “Hurt Locker” the lowest-grossing best-picture winner in Oscar history. (No. 2 is probably “The Last Emperor” from 1987, but when you adjust for inflation, Bernardo Bertolucci’s costume drama made almost three times as much money as Bigelow’s war epic.) It’s delicious and strange and at least potentially ironic that this happened in the year when the Academy expanded the best-picture category from five to 10 nominees, in an evident effort to make the competition more commercial and more attractive to mainstream audiences.

Honestly, the only conclusion I can draw is that Academy members are voting with their hearts. Who’da thunk it? Maybe an earlier generation of Oscar voters was more persuaded by box-office numbers, mass popularity and marketing muscle — or was simply more in tune with mass taste — but they evidently don’t give a damn about those things now. Personally, I’d have ranked a couple of other nominees above “Hurt Locker” — definitely “A Serious Man,” maybe “An Education” — but it’s an idiosyncratic film made by a genuine visionary. Even setting aside the history-making element of this vote (which was surely a consideration) it’s a respectable choice.

Now, the Academy brass, especially its marketing mavens and the shepherds of its lucrative contract with ABC, may take a more jaundiced view of the membership’s sudden attack of integrity and independence. Oscar’s long relationship with the wider moviegoing public has always been tempestuous, but both as a television franchise and a touchstone of cultural relevance, the Academy Awards cannot afford to be seen as some elitist, out-of-touch coastal bastion of indieness. If we allowed ABC execs a free spin in the time machine, and a chance to replace the last four or five years’ worth of Oscar-winners with movies heartland consumers actually paid to watch, they’d take it in a heartbeat.

Still, at least in terms of water-cooler controversy, this year’s Oscars were largely successful. Mind you, the telecast was a misbegotten mishmash, and the toxic, unfunny repartee of Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin made Hugh Jackman’s 2009 song-and-dance numbers look like the height of showbiz professionalism. But viewership was up, reaching the best numbers since the “Crash on Brokeback Mountain” showdown of 2006, and the huge roster of nominated films yielded contradictory but complementary results: Multiple nominations for hugely popular films, and an underdog victory. A lifetime achievement award for Jeff “The Dude” Bridges (let’s be honest; that’s what it was), and shocking proof that Sandra Bullock is not just a human being but a funny, warm and generous-spirited one as well.

But the repercussions of “The Hurt Locker’s” victory over “Avatar” go well beyond Kathryn Bigelow’s historic breakthrough, and well beyond questions of which movie you or I like better, or which one made more money. It’s another salvo in Hollywood’s peculiar, long-running war against itself, a war unlikely to have any winners.