Jedi knights, cheeky web-slingers and pre-crime cops aside, the summer of 2002 may turn out to be best remembered for the long nuclear shadow it cast. Granted, the movies we have in mind might not have carried nearly the same sort of weight had our fragile, post-9/11 psyches not already been so damaged, but that's a hair for others to split. The bottom line? For those not sufficiently freaked out at the beginning of the summer by The Sum of All Fears, along comes K-19: The Widowmaker to finish the job.
A veil of years between us and the events in the movie makes K-19 a less unsettling prospect — the film takes place in the early 1960s, after all — but the threat of atomic ugliness is front and center in such a way that all but guarantees our attention. Add some graphic footage of folks dying horrible deaths from radiation poisoning, and you've got a film seemingly tailor-made for a world where dirty bomb scares are becoming as common as Elvis sightings.
K-19 also boasts a powerhouse teaming of movie stars — Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson — and a director who, while not exactly an A-List name, has made some great little films in her time (Kathryn Bigelow, who helmed Near Dark and Strange Days). Now if only this was anywhere near a good movie, we'd really have something to talk about.
A great big, juicy story told in far less than perfect fashion, K-19 unfolds in a time as rattled by end-of-the-world paranoia as our own. Archrivals America and the Soviet Union each possess huge atomic arsenals and itchy trigger fingers, and everybody from the generals to the enlisted men to the guy working at the corner drugstore is rightfully nervous and afraid. As the movie's pre-credit message tells us, the biggest big shots on both sides of the Iron Curtain feel that it's not a question of if nuclear war will occur, but when.
The movie focuses on the Soviet side of this equation, presenting us with what is basically a true story of the ill-fated voyage of a Russian nuclear submarine. The K-19 was the pride of the Russian fleet, a mightily armed missile carrier that was touted by the Soviet power elite as "the finest sub in the world." In reality, the ship was far from perfect, and Moscow's mad rush to have the vessel ready in time for its first trial mission meant that there was absolutely no chance of addressing many of those imperfections. Critical controls and machinery did not function correctly, and, simply put, the ship and its crew were just not up to the task. But the ship sailed anyway.
The sub and its mission were, of course, cursed — something that the audience realizes within the first 15 minutes and that K-19 pounds into our skulls for the next two-and-a-quarter hours. Ten men are dead even before the ship leaves dock, including a doctor pulverized by a truck while trying to warn the suppliers that K-19 has been stocked with the wrong types of medicine. It's almost anticlimactic when the champagne bottle fails to break during the boat's christening, whereupon every member of the crew silently stares into space, each man realizing that their bad luck is only beginning.
The whole thing has the feel of some bleak, epic Dostoevskian tragedy, complete with plodding, minor-key music that sounds like some lost Shostakovich score. Heroism and humanism are assured, but doom is inevitable. As the movie's prologue makes clear, it's just a matter of how and when.
Into this murky picture comes Capt. Alexei Vostrikov (Harrison Ford), a can-do guy sent by Moscow to assume command from the ship's original commander, Captain Mikhail Polenin (Liam Neeson). The two officers are both basically good men but with significantly different styles of leadership that increasingly put them on a collision course. Ford's character relentlessly pushes the crew through a series of ever more difficult and dangerous drills, prompting Neeson's concern that his colleague's overzealous professionalism is putting the men and the ship in jeopardy.
Neither of the two men is painted as a traditional bad guy (or, for that matter, a typical good guy), but the movie continues to maneuver them into place as would-be friends who become mutual antagonists and, eventually, combatants. The head-butting act becomes more and more aggressive, and K-19 threatens to turn itself into a Russki Caine Mutiny. That transformation never quite takes place, which is probably unfortunate since the movie ultimately lacks the sort of moral or emotional clarity (not to mention the excitement) that just such a development might have offered.
Spurred on by Ford's relentless regimen, the crew succeeds in launching a test missile that nearly gets everyone killed, and then winds up springing a leak in their nuclear reactor. With the temperature rising and faced with the impending devastation of a nuclear-thermal explosion, the movie's last half becomes even messier and more chaotic than its first. As vaguely religious chorale music drones away in the background, we watch scores of young men mutate into jittery masses of popped veins and oozing, open sores, as rescue mission after rescue mission fails, and the heroic but utterly ill-prepared crew begins succumbing to the grisly effects of radiation sickness.
It all should have been a lot more poignant than it is. After all, the movie drops broad hints that the men are giving their lives for a system (Communism) in which many of them don't completely believe, and for a commanding officer whose methods most of them find troubling. And yet K-19 never really makes us care much about its characters — few display personalities or allegiances that are particularly palpable — or their plight. The film's visual language lacks clarity as well, with much of it shot in dim light, close quarters and in such a cramped, jumpy fashion that it's often difficult to tell exactly what's happening or how much significance to place in any single action or event.
Wolfgang Peterson used a similar visual approach in his classic men-stuck-in-a-sub flick Das Boot, but that film turned claustrophobia and the ship itself into the movie's main characters and made it all work. Unlike Das Boot or even a dark landlocked drama like Road to Perdition, the mood of K-19 is so pointlessly somber (and occasionally sanctimonious) that it's rarely able to muster any sort of real energy, much less suspense. Poor pacing and erratic storytelling rob it of much of its remaining potential for dramatic impact.
As for Neeson and Ford, each of these veteran actors gives it the old college try, but unable to overcome an uneven and (sorry, got to say it) waterlogged script, neither is able to supply the movie with enough of a central dramatic focus. Ultimately, neither actor really even seems clear on who his character is or how he's supposed to relate to the other.
For what it's worth, both men offer up mild but serviceable Russian accents, just enough to give a hint of their supposed national origins. It should be noted that Ford's inflections occasionally veer into Wild and Crazy Guy territory — a miscalculation made even more noticeable in light of the actor's increasing resemblance to an aging Steve Martin — but that's just one minor blemish a movie filled with more than its share of them.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
K-19: The Widowmaker
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Stars Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson and Peter Sarsgaard
Opens July 19 at local theaters
This article appears in Jul 17-23, 2002.