Posted: 07/20/2002

K-19: The Widowmaker

(2002)

by Hank Yuloff

Excellent suspense, drama, action with Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.

Long before the champagne bottle fails to break across the bow of the submarine number 294, a mariner’s curse, we know that this is a ship in trouble. There are leaks in dry dock. There is faulty wiring and gauges. It’s the lowest bidder phenomenon with no quality control.

This is the setup for K-19: The Widowmaker, the new film by director Kathryn Bigelow (Strange Days, Blue Steel) that stars Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson as two captains of Russia’s first nuclear ballistic missile submarine. Neeson (Star Wars II, Schindler’s List) plays Capt Mikhail Polenin, the first captain of K-19, who is reduced to First Officer before the boat is ready for sea trials. He’s reduced because the high command does not like the progress he is making in getting the ship ready for duty. This doesn’t seem fair since they are the ones who are continually sending him the wrong parts or not sending them at all. It becomes a running joke for us to hear about a back up system that does not get installed or some other piece of equipment that has no use at all. Talk about blaming the messenger. I was waiting for them to pull out a window screen.

He is replaced by Captain Alexi Vostrikov (Ford from American Graffiti, but not much since), a more hard nosed submariner, who’s job it is to take the ship to sea. This sets up the inevitable (and often used) struggle between their two methods of winning the admiration of the men.

Their mission is to go under the Arctic ice cap and launch a test missile, thus letting the Americans know that Mother Russia is serious about this mutually assured destruction thing and can send a ship right off our coast if she wants to blow up Washington DC. Getting to their mission objective is only one part of this plot, which allows us to betaken on a roller coaster ride of a story.

As long as I am talking about overused or often used plot lines, you get to witness one of my all time favorites: The man who fails at first, but reaches deep inside his soul to save his comrades in arms while giving up his life. This was the ship’s nuclear officer played by Peter Sarsgaard (Boys Don’t Cry opposite Hilary Swank). Funny enough, as soon as I saw him kissing his fiancé good-bye, I leaned over to my wife and said, “That guy’s not coming back alive.” I actually liked Sarsgaard’s performance. He was emotional without overplaying the role. Another good performance was turned in by Christian Camargo (Lip Service), another member of the nuclear team on the ship. He plays counterpoint to Sarsgaard in that he is the first to volunteer for the difficult assignment that should have belonged to Sarsgaard.

If you have seen the trailer, you can surmise that the ship gets into some trouble with its nuclear reactor, but are going to make it back home. You can also figure this out because there weren’t any stories of nuclear explosions in the North Atlantic in our history books. The Russians were able to keep many things from the world, but that would have been hard.

Neeson and Ford are great actors who made this a highly watchable movie, and I give it a positive recommendation. But if I was going to rate it among other submarine-genre movies I’ve seen, I would have to put it behind (and this is in no particular order except for the first one): The Hunt for Red October, Crimson Tide, Operation Petticoat, Das Boot, U-571, and anything with John Wayne.

Hank Yuloff is an above the water kind of writer in Los Angeles who just found one more reason he never wanted to serve on a submarine.

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