"We shall be a ghost ship".

Rating: 8/10 (15 October 2011)

There's something about submarine movies, the claustrophobic feel that hints at certain doom if conditions go awry, that make them interesting and compelling. Probably the best of the genre is the German film "Das Boot" offering a look at a naval disaster in the offing from the enemy point of view. "K-19" is of similar bent, and just as in "Das Boot", the viewer may find himself secretly cheering for the bad guys to find a way out of peril. Yet they're bad only by accident of nationality, following orders of supreme commanders who consider human life throwaway in service to the Fatherland.
Based on actual events as recent as 1961, I see that other reviewers who have knowledge of the historical K-19 found it to be more fiction than fact. Putting that aside, I still found the story to be a gripping drama once it became apparent that the crippled sub could be saved only at the expense of ultimate human sacrifice. That there are such men who find their duty to their fellows, their comrades, and not their nation is what becomes inspirational with effective story telling.
If you're used to seeing Harrison Ford as Han Solo or Indiana Jones, his characterization here as the Russian naval captain may startle you with it's bluntness and lack of compassion. As the hard driving commander, he rides herd on his crew to perform in drill after relentless drill, subliminally preparing them for the disaster that will eventually befall the ship. As the XO, Liam Neeson's Mikhail Polenin is the sympathetic executive officer the crew can relate to, thereby setting up a clever twist when Polenin refuses to take part in the mutiny. The idea that Vostrikov would have sacrificed the crew to avoid triggering a world war was an element that added unexpected nuance to the story.
My main takeaway from the picture is an idea I've had all along about the way peoples of different nations can live peacefully together if simply left to their own devices. Good war films project that message, it's the men at the top calling the shots for their own motives who make life miserable for the rest. Taken to it's extreme, competing goals of world domination point the way to mutually assured destruction.