"K-19: The Widowmaker"

Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson face off in a gripping and complex yarn about the 1961 nuclear accident aboard a Soviet sub that could have ignited World War III.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Jul 19, 2002 | When you go see "K-19: The Widowmaker," Kathryn Bigelow's gripping account of the 1961 nuclear accident aboard a Soviet submarine that nearly launched World War III, bring a sweater. First of all, it's midsummer and the proprietor of your local multiplex probably has the air conditioning cranked up too high. Second of all, you're about to spend two and a half hours in a steel tube beneath the freezing Arctic seas, trapped between a leaking nuclear reactor, an autocratic captain and the paranoid Communist Party bureaucracy, convinced you'll never see the Motherland again.

OK, you won't really. It's an illusion. But it's one hell of an illusion. "K-19: The Widowmaker" may be a bit too grim and claustrophobic to become a certifiable summer blockbuster, but it's a pulse-pounding thriller that brings one of the Cold War's darkest and deadliest episodes to the big screen. In place of the overblown histrionics of most summer movies, "K-19" offers a vivid, highly realistic yarn of real-life heroism, the story of a small group of isolated and terrified men who risked death to save the world from apocalypse.

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.

Next Page: Eyes roll at the Communist propaganda about America (most of it true)

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