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.
