Would have done better if it had had a different title

Rating: Null/10 (23 March 2003)

I was going to make a few pedestrian complaints: you know, about the fake Russian accents, and the somewhat bald exposition and dialogue at the start... and also, and I think I really will complain about this, the silly title. Titles shouldn't have colons. Call your film "K-19", or call it "The Widowmaker"; don't try to have it both ways.
But such concerns are washed away by what happens when the voyage is underway. Before it's over we're made to watch disturbing footage of sailors working away inside the bit of the reactor where ten minutes' exposure might not have been fatal if they'd been wearing radiation suits, which they weren't; we're also made to endure the sight of their their blistered flesh afterwards. It's hard going watching this. But here's the thing: at no point did I resent being shown this. We needed to see it, really, for the characters to have been treated with the proper amount of respect. Showing us the horrible nuclear scars is not gratuitous nastiness, not manipulation, but just a way of making sure that we get our taste of the natural consequences of the situation, too.
I was forced to the conclusion that this is a film with very little in the way of false heroics. For the most part it's the real thing. Cold-war Russia, like the USA, was isolated from the world at large; the armed forces of both countries were (and are) isolated still further; and, as if more isolation is even possible, these sailors were effectively imprisoned on a secret submarine in the middle of nowhere. They're torn between fear of the immediate physical dangers facing them, fear of what the state could do to them even if they survive, and fear of nuclear war. No wonder their hands are inclined to shake. Bigelow gets all of this across and, more importantly, doesn't forget any of it just for the sake of getting a plot point or one-liner across.
At least, she doesn't do so while the sub is at sea. If you were to start the film with the ship setting out and end it with ... well, the end of the voyage (I won't say how it ends), you'd have a faultless film. Alas, there's an epilogue. It's such a stupid one it's hard even to connect it with what has gone before.
It ends with the same poisonous message of such standard modern-day hymns to the military as "Black Hawk Down" and "We Were Soldiers". It's the "we don't fight for cause or country, we fight for each other" spiel. I've heard this echoed so often by people who serve in the US armed forces (or claim to) it makes my blood run cold. A group of people are handed (in this case) a submarine capable of launching nuclear missiles, and we're asked to accept that it's a GOOD THING that the only obligation these people feel they have is to one another? The army is an instrument designed to kill people, and we actually want to LET it think that it's the only thing that matters? That it's above not only the law but morality as well?
The preceding film makes nonsense of this. The crew of K-19 elect to submerge their ship and risk their lives rather than risk an accident which might see the United States retaliate against Moscow precisely because they DO have other things on their mind. These people, luckily, are human beings first and sailors second. So why is the prologue - which really begins with the military trial the officers face upon their return - even there? Why is it allowed to have precisely the same revolting flavour (watered down, thank goodness) that films subsidised and vetted by the Pentagon invariably have?
I suspect so much of this drivel is being produced that it now finds its way into perfectly good films, like this one, by accident.