Disaster At Sea.

Rating: 5/10 (9 January 2016)

A sad and confused movie. It's not Kathryn Bigelow's finest hour as a director but I don't image there's too much that could have been done with the script, which seems as hastily thrown together as the submarine itself.
The most egregious jolt to continuity probably arrives near the end. Liam Neeson, the Executive Officer, has been a paragon of good sense throughout, pleading the cause of humanity in the face of skipper Tom Ford's blockheaded determination to stretch his boat's envelope and refuse aid from an American ship nearby.
The crew mutinies. They handcuff Ford, who sometimes seems deranged, and turn over the boat to Neeson. The officers agree with the act. The commissar initiates the act. Then Neeson's character, with a pistol in his hand, spins around in a neat "about FACE" and releases Ford from his shackles, turning command back over to him with a big smile. The non sequitur drops to the deck with a heavy CLUNK heard throughout the boat.
There is little joy on K-19. The boat itself was hastily assembled in an attempt to keep up with US innovations and the recklessness showed up repeatedly in one accident after another. The photographer and art director turn the boat into the kind of dismal mechanical prison that no US submarine ever looked like. The lights are low, the fittings shabby and peeling, the bulkheads warped and fragile. It's enough to kill your appetite if you're not eating caviar and drinking red wine.
But I can see why this was greenlighted. "Das Boot" had been a great critical and commercial success a decade earlier. "Das Boot" was a movie about a German U-boat in wartime and it invested its characters with human features. This is a Hollywood movie that tries to do the same thing for the USSR that "Das Boot" did for Germany. Except that now we have CGIs which allow more in the way of fires and explosions than Wolfgang Peterson had in 1982.
As the captain, Ford is rather dull; Neeson is a more animated and thoughtful figure; Peter Sarsgaard as the reactor officer is winning in a naive boyish way. Loved his cowardly refusal to enter the irradiated Compartment of Doom.
The whole thing can be construed as a post Cold War analogy. The Russian people were just as good as anybody else but their leadership was whimsical and stupid.