Thursday, November 8, 2018

K-19: The Widowmaker (First Light Production, IMF Internationale Medien und Film GmbH & Co. 2. Produktions KG, Intermedia Films, Paramount Pictures, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. I turned off the political news and watched what turned out to be a surprisingly good movie: K-19: The Widowmaker, which I had assumed from the title would be a mountaineering film but is actually a movie about a real-life disaster that occurred to a Russian submarine in 1961. The Soviet Union had just commissioned the construction of its first nuclear-powered submarine armed with nuclear missiles, K-19, as a response to the U.S. deployment in 1959 of Polaris, a similarly powered and equipped craft. Only in their rush to get it into the water and show it off to the Americans, the Soviet Navy launched it before it was ready, when a lot of the safety systems hadn’t been installed yet and the ones that were hadn’t been tested for reliability, and as a result midway through the voyage — which was supposed to duplicate the U.S. sub Nautilus’s feat of sailing under the Arctic Circle and fire a harmless test missile just to let the Americans know the Soviets now had that deterrent capability, too — the cooling pipes feeding distilled water to the sub’s power reactors to keep its radioactive core from melting down started to leak, the core temperature went up to nearly 1,000° Celsius, and the crew started to worry about whether the reactor would not only melt down itself but set off the nuclear warheads in the missiles, thereby starting World War III as the Americans would read that as an all-out Russian first strike and retaliate against Moscow, Leningrad and the USSR’s other major cities. Complicating the plot is a struggle for control between two rival captains, Mikhail Polenin (Liam Neeson) — the commander the crew were used to working with and with whom they had a good relationship — and Aleksei Vostrikov (Harrison Ford, top-billed, who got $25 million to make this movie), installed by the political authorities just before the K-19 is about to be launched, who takes command and demotes Polenin to his executive officer. The script by Louis Nowra (story) and Christopher Kyle (screenplay) borrows a lot from other submarine movies as well as things like The Caine Mutiny (at one point the ship’s political officer, concerned that Vostrikov’s refusal to issue a distress call to a U.S. destroyer monitoring K-19 will result in the deaths of all K-19’s crew members, attempts to arrest Vostrikov and re-install Polenin as captain, but Polenin himself forestalls the mutiny and orders Vostrikov freed), but it’s also a gripping tale of men in extreme conditions fighting for their own survival. 

The big plot twist is that the men have to go into the radioactive chamber to install a replacement pipe to get coolant into the reactor, and they have to do this twice because the first time works only temporarily. Because of the ultra-high level of radiation in the chamber, the crew members can only do this for 10 minutes — meaning there has to be a constant rotation of people in and out of the supposedly protective suits (a line of dialogue reveals that K-19 was supplied only with conventional haz-mat suits that are useless against radiation — which reminded me of the chilling real-life footage of the cleanup at Chernobyl, which was executed by people clad in costumes that looked like they were playing medieval knights in a Monty Python spoof and were no doubt similarly useless in protecting them against radiation), and seven of the crew members get fatal doses of radiation and die, while others expire later but still well before their time of the lingering effects. K-19 was directed by Kathryn Bigelow — yet another odd example of the first, and so far the only, female winner of the Academy Award for Best Director making a movie with virtually no women in the cast — and it was such a commercial flop (a $35 million gross on a $100 million investment) she didn’t get to make another film until The Hurt Locker seven years later — but of the three films of hers I’ve seen (the others are The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty) I liked this the best, perhaps because this was a the-“enemy”-are-human-too movie and not a piece of pro-“War on Terror” agitprop like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, and also I suspect because the conflicts are far more basic and, as imdb.com reviewer “mozu” wrote, “The men sacrificed themselves not for The State or some ideology, but for each other, their fellow men & their leader.” K-19: The Widowmaker is quite a movie (even though the first third, until the accident happens, is somewhat slow going — though I liked the irony that Vostrikov has been putting his men through so many drills that when a real crisis occurs one of the sailors basically responds, “I’m sick and tired of all these drills”) and a real testament to Bigelow’s real talent for making macho movies about men under stress.