The truth is out there. Somewhere.

Rating: 1/10 (7 April 2006)

A mutiny aboard a crippled sub. Angry clashes between the captain and his second in command. Guns being waved. Handcuffs clamped on.
No mention of missing strawberries, but otherwise it's life on and below the high seas as you know it folks, confrontational, claustrophobic.
And all. . . fiction. Clichés dredged up by mediocre writers to be festooned around a real story, of a real accident, where the heroism was likewise as real as it gets.
Given the director's provenance, one might reasonably have expected a respect for the truth as well as for the sacrifice of all those who died.
But no. Trite, tedious and time-wasting, K19 is just another sad, shoddy example of dumbed-down American movie-making, one that in this instance is all the more odious for its arrogance in believing that the chronicle of this tragedy actually needed fictionalising.
And stunningly inept, too: whilst asserting that the incident remained a secret for many years, the script's many infelicities include a sequence where the submariners moon a nearby US destroyer and one crew member finally cracks and jumps into the sea to swim to the destroyer -- yeah, right, nobody on the US destroyer, nobody in Naval Intelligence, nobody anywhere at all in The Pentagon afterwards thought there was anything odd about it all.
But of course, nobody did. Because the Americans weren't there. And so the submariners didn't drop their pants for, uh, anyone.
What they did do, instead, was risk their lives -- and lose their lives -- grappling with a nightmare brought on by a Soviet system that was always a bigger threat to its own people than the rest of the world.
Though Bigelow's reputation very properly went down with this insensitive mess of a movie, the real sadness here (apart from the true story itself) resides in the demeaning of the medium itself, for film can, when it tries, be as fine a weapon in the service of truth as any book. One might have thought so august a body as National Geograpic would've known that, too, but apparently not: NG's involvement in the movie is enough to put anyone off being a future subscriber.
After K:19, what next? Perhaps the Kursk tragedy, with a back-story of how the Captain was struggling with the dilemma of coming out, and the boat's builders were in hock to the Russian mafiya and so skimped on the construction, and one of the crew smuggles a pet monkey on board with the ebola virus which will mutate under the influence of radioactivity from a damaged reactor and make its way via sub-sea currents to break as a toxic tsunami upon American shores.
All fiction, of course, but who cares? It's only a movie. So that's all right then.