good for the History Channel...but that's about it

Rating: 6/10 (4 May 2005)

I was quite interested to see this when I saw its preview back in March of 2002. Then when it came out in July of that year, it received dismal and abysmal (what a pun)reviews. I just thought: when is Katheryn Bigelow ever going to make a critic-friendly movie? I thought that this would be it. I admit, I've got two of her movies on DVD and I like her style, so it was very interesting to watch this film of her's that tanked that summer. The accents aren't annoying if you don't let them be: when I saw that Ford was going to be a Soviet sub commander, the first thing I assumed was that he couldn't do a Russian accent. Done. Problem solved. Next. But so many people and critics couldn't get past them. How did Errol Flynn survive, then? And what about Kevin Costner at that? One critic called Ford and Neeson exchanging "Boris and Natasha accents." Peter Saarsgard was interesting and really committed himself to the part, as the clichéd doomed young virginal officer. Liam Neeson was okay (although I think he's a bit overrated in life). All in all, this wasn't a bad film, but it wasn't that good, either. I was curious before I saw the film on how they were going to actually make a good, taut movie about a nuclear meltdown. Well, they didn't make a taut, good movie out of it. They couldn't. That's material that just isn't scary when first comes to mind. Hazardous, yes. Terrifying- no. And even the title weirded me out: sounds like a personal lubricant or a porno!
The production design was good (although I read earlier on this site that there weren't any handcuffs in the Soviet Union until much later after 1961). The submarine's interior and instruments were so primitive compared to our technology (which was typical- they were always a decade behind us back in the Cold War), it looked like they borrowed the set from "Das Boot". And being that my father was an Army Intelligence officer of Soviet equipment in the 80s, I found their practice of only having aspirin aboard for their only first aid realistic (not to mention how they did not possess radiation suits either). The Soviet armed forces then did not believe in human weakness, nor could it stomach it. So it was very commonplace and practiced not to provide ulterior equipment aside from firepower.
After all the submarine flicks that have come out in the past fifteen years, from "Red October" to "Crimson Tide", I think that I've grown out of my interest in watching them after seeing K-19.