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.

As a grueling "trip" movie and cautionary tale of the nuclear age, K-19 fits the bill. The harsh depiction of everyday life in the Soviet navy and numerous scenes of seamen exposing themselves to lethal doses of radiation are profoundly disturbing.

As square-shouldered as you'd expect of a National Geographic co-production. But Bigelow hits all her marks and more within the narrow parameters.

Perhaps the post-cold-war attitudes behind this film are progressive, but the same old pre-nuclear-war worship of the military goes all but unchallenged.

Obediently follows the verities of the submarine movie and its true story origins but without the imagination needed to refresh the genre.

The lead actors come from America, Ireland, Iceland, England and South Africa. Who decided they should attempt Russian accents? Neeson forgets his, Ford wavers in and out, and real Russians in the cast make the others sound inauthentic.

Rarely has a major motion picture -- and this one is major by virtue of its misplaced ambition as well as its budget -- been afflicted by such flagrant dissonance between subject and style.

This is a decent Harrison Ford thriller with goodish acting and some quite exciting scenes.

This film is very slightly based on a real fact, which was the fateful maiden voyage of the nuclear submarine K19, one of the first nuclear ballistic submarines of the Soviet Union. Built in haste, he had several accidents and deaths before he was thrown into the sea. On the maiden voyage, the ship suffers a loss of coolant that controlled the temperature of the nuclear reactor, which forced the crew to risk their lives for emergency repairs on the high sea, preventing the reactor from collapsing. Most of the crew died of the effects of radiation in the following years. The survivors, however, still preserve their memory today. The film was an insult to the memory of the K19 sailors, a fact emphasized by the surviving sailors, in a unanimous protest. Eager to make the film more appealing, and always under "creative freedom" arguments, the director Kathryn Bigelow allowed the whole story to be rewritten and told in a completely different way from the real facts. So it's a work of fiction, cloaked under the "true facts" that the film never really take advantage of. After all, the movie is very good from the entertainment point of view. It's not a movie that we get tired of seeing and reviewing, once in a while. This, coupled with a good commercial performance, has opened the doors of television, where it's still a regular, both in general channels and in channels specifically dedicated to the exhibition of films. The film can be divided into two parts. The first one tries to be an introduction to the film, presenting the characters, the environment, the submarine, the life on board and the mission that they must accomplish. The second part is the realization of the accident and the unwinding of attempts to repair the submarine, with increasing tension around the subject. The biggest problem I've felt is the exaggerated prolongation of the first half of the movie. It was not really necessary to attend so many exercises. The whole sub-plot involving the insubordination of the sailors assigned to the First Officer, who was the previous commander of that crew, is also expendable. Harrison Ford is an excellent actor and makes, in this film, one of his most interesting works, for me. The actor did an excellent job, giving life and psychological depth to a deep and complex character. At his side we see Liam Neeson, also one of the best-executed works of his career. The way the two perform together is excellent, and some of the film's best dialogues run between them. The remaining cast complies with their work, but does not deserve attention. Technically, the film does not make big mistakes. The submarine's interior looks genuine enough, the cinematography, light and sound do their job discreetly, the soundtrack does not deserve great remarks. It's an interesting and entertaining film, but tells a new story, invented over a real one, that remains to be told. The uneven pace does not help either, but if you really like submarine movies, you will not even feel the time go by.