Good story, but not history; it cheats to raise the stakes

Rating: Null/10 (16 August 2003)

Spoilers ahead, mate! Turn your course ninety degrees north or you'll run aground on Spoiler Island!
The opening says, `Inspired by actual events,' which basically means that there really was a Hotel-class sub called K-19 that had reactor trouble. That's about as close as the movie gets to the real events. Everything else, even the names of the participants, has been changed to serve the story.
But it's a good story, with interesting people, conflict over important things, and jaw-hurting tension. Captain Vostrikov and XO Polenin are excellently portrayed by Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson (and their accents aren't as bad as all that; aside from varying in intensity they were decent enough). Vostrikov really is a bad and irresponsible commander; every criticism that Polenin levels at him is true. That makes Polenin's actions in supporting him all the more interesting. But Vostrikov does learn from Polenin's example.
The heart of the movie is the reactor near-meltdown, and the terrible consequences it has. Military movies all too often portray courage as simply risking one's life to kill other people. But what you see in this movie is REAL courage: I'd rather go into battle ten times than do what the reactor techs have to do in this movie. Bigelow's portrayal of the chief reactor officer's breakdown is a touch of genius; it shows us what the people who did go into the reactor chamber felt, and overcame, and what the reactor officer himself overcomes later in the movie. This movie should never have been marketed as a blockbuster; it works best as a simple and touching tale of heroism.
Regrettably, Bigelow felt she had to cheat to keep the audience's interest, specifically by selling us the preposterous story that the reactor meltdown could have caused a 1.4 megaton nuclear explosion. This changes the story from one that merely didn't happen, into one that could not possibly have ever happened. Nuclear reactors cannot cause nuclear explosions, because they don't use weapons-grade uranium. Even if they did, it would require explosives, not just heat, to crush the uranium to a sufficiently supercritical density to detonate it.
Why did Bigelow resort to this? Did she believe that a Western-world audience wouldn't care about the fate of mere Russkies, so that she needed to pretend that the fate of the whole world depended on K-19 to keep her viewers watching? If so, she lacked confidence in the story she told. I was, and am, a partisan of the West in the Cold War, and am glad that the West emerged victorious, but neither am I inclined to blame these Soviet Navy sailors for the evils of the tyrannical system that they were born into. I would have enjoyed the movie every bit as much had Bigelow admitted that the sailors were fighting only for their own lives and the lives of their fellow crewmen. And for those chauvinists who would see these sailors as less than human for being Russian, pretending that they saved the world doesn't help.
Rating: *** out of ****.
Recommendation: See it in the theater, and bring your suspension of disbelief along; it needs a workout.