July 19, 2002

K-19: The Widowmaker
(Paramount) Rated R
Release Date - July 19, 2002

Glub, glub, glub…

I can’t really understand why anyone is giving K-19: The Widowmaker a pass.  And a whole lot of people are.  At least one critic has suggested that it compares favorably with Das Boot, which makes me wonder exactly what that guy was watching.  There is not a single element in K-19 that deserves to even be mentioned in the same breath as Das Boot… except maybe the CG… because there was no CG when Das Boot was made.  In fact, there is not a single element in K-19 that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Crimson Tide… except for the effort by the production team to make the story as close as possible to that hit, even if history – which this story is “based on” – isn’t a real fit.

K-19 is rotten at the core.   I’m not going to explain how until later in the review, after a spoiler warning, because I believe any examination of the Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson characters will be a spoiler…. though I wouldn’t shed a single tear over spilt rotten milk.

But before examining the central – and virtually only – relationship in the picture, a few words on its surface.  This is Kathryn Bigalow’s worst effort yet. The tag on Bigalow has long been that she has great visual skills and trouble bringing her stories together.  Movies like Point Break and Strange Days are absolutely worth the time of movie lovers because of Bigalow’s work and the work she gets out of her actors even though, in the final analysis, both films fail.   I wish I could point to a single great visual moment in the entirety of K-19.  There are one or two decent sequences of intensity in the boat, but nothing particularly special or memorable.   She chose to use a lot of CG to show the exterior of the ship, but it feels fake and completely superfluous.  Never do you get the feel, except from the wads of expositional dialogue, that we are in 1961, in another era of behavior or in a cold war that means anything to a military crew.

Perhaps the most bizarre visual choice is the unrealistic height of corridors inside the submarine.  I was fortunate enough to spend a few hours on a real submarine a couple of years ago and at six feet, I was occasionally cramped.  The captain of the ship, who was, as I recall, 6’ 3”, told the story of how he had to stay hunched over more often than not and had to find spaces where he could stretch out to his full height.  Liam Neeson is 6’ 5” and in the film, always has at least a foot of head room, except when moving though doorways.  Come on.

The accents were a big part of the negative buzz on this film from early test screenings and indeed, every accent is different, accents drift in and out mid-sentence and take you out of the Russian mindset of the piece.  That said, it was far from my biggest problem with this film.  I would have been aware of the problem, but it’s one of those things that people jump on in any film like this.  The most clever method I’ve seen in dealing with it in recent years was in Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone, in which everyone in the WWII concentration camp used their real life accents.  It took a little getting used to, but it eventually allowed the viewer to focus on the humanity that brings us together as a species and not on the accents that separate us, good or evil. 

Okay… time to get into the story and characters…

SPOILERS AHOY!!!