Solid Effort That Will Improve Over Time

Rating: Null/10 (11 September 2003)

The problem with this solid story is that, pre-release and upon premiere, it was oversold as a blockbuster. Of course, as do so many films about America's military which purport to depict a historical event, the story was overlaid with the unnecessary and false dramatics of the skipper vs. executive officer command-style conflict, a burdensome device which only detracted from the terseness and impact of the central drama.
Instead of that ersatz melodrama I expect K-19 would have benefitted from a bit more character revelation of the junior officer and enlisted crewmembers. For instance: we never find out how the poor man whose hand got pulped in the torpedo hoist chain comes to fare: a little vignette of a buddy visiting the injured sailor in sick bay, perhaps talking wistfully of their sweethearts or wives and children, would have served the story much better by foreshadowing and mirroring the plight of their later-crippled vessel.
Harrison Ford serves - I can't say "acts" - well, if not splendidly, in the role of a Soviet sub captain: he portrays a stolid technician-cum-ideologue humanized by his experience aboard K-19, and who is disillusioned yet reconciled by his ex-crew to professional pride at the story's close which occurs after the demise of the Soviet Union. Liam Neeson is fine as the sub's executive officer, despite his having been burdened with the unhistorical plot conflict between his character and Ford's. The other actor hobbled by Hollywood's insistence on showing the rabidly political Nazi officer stereotype was, in this case, the poor guy who had to play the spineless party commissar: let me assure you that party commissars for service aboard Russky nuke boats were not chosen from the ranks of the wishy-washy or the ideologically dubious.
Though it's used here as a drama-heightening device, whether, or not, the sub's nigh-melting-down nuclear reactor would actually have caused the vessel's nuclear armaments to have detonated is immaterial: the core of the story is the self-sacrifice of the crew volunteers who deliberately exposed themselves to lethal overdoses of gamma rays to save their shipmates.
Whether, or not, sailors are warriors or merchant mariners, their first battle is always with the sea - a battle that often involves sailors having to live with the consequences of the feebleness of marine engineering pitted against the vast, pitiless environment in which their technology must sail...and survive. This is the heart of the story of the "unsinkable" RMS Titanic, and it's the crux of the story of K-19: human frailty and smallness versus the implacable sea - and equally implacable physics.
There's one glaring blooper. When we first see Harrison Ford's character uniforming himself, detraining in the Moscow railway station, and climbing the grand staircase of the naval headquarters, he's wearing on his greatcoat the shoulder board insignia of a Captain Second Rank. Immediately after ascending the headquarters stairs, when Ford's shown in the headquarters room getting his orders from the admirals and the Red Army marshal (played by Joss Ackland), he's wearing on his reefer jacket (which is worn under the winter greatcoat) the shoulder board insignia AND the cuff rank lace of a Captain First Rank. In the next sequence - his arrival on the Kola Peninsula to take command of K-19 - his shoulder board insignia have magically returned to those of a Captain Second Rank. Considering that the DVD of K-19 contains a special feature devoted to the production's attention to details - which were in all other respects lavish, accurate, and pleasing - this insignia blooper is cruelly obvious.
K-19's central "character" profits also from extensive cosmetic and seaworthy conversion from a smaller ex-Soviet sub to mimic the dimensions and profile of the real K-19: a costly but worthwhile expense that delivers realism unachievable with CGI.
Overall I liked the film and its central narrative and how it was told; and the storytelling provoked me to sympathize with the plight of K-19's crew and to admire their humanity, comradeship, and heroism. I expect this is one of those films that's underappreciated at its debut, yet one which will earn its due of greater acclaim in later years. Kathryn Bigelow's direction is surehanded at K-19's documentary style and at its larger, more sweeping cinemaphotography (composition-in-frame is quite good actually as seen, for examples, in the pre-launching and christening scenes), and I hope she will make more films I shall enjoy seeing. Of ten stars I award it seven.