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Only Hiroshima was less—it was a lot less
I watched Kathryn Bigelow's K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) because I wanted another submarine movie after Black Sea (2014) and I didn't have the five hours free for Das Boot (1981). I'm still sorting how I feel about it as historical fiction, but as an extended opportunity for mechanical failure, moral dilemmas, and men acting their faces off, I have to say it does what it said on the tin.
There was a real Hotel-class submarine designated K-19, ordered by the Soviet Navy in 1957 and launched in 1959. She was never nicknamed "the Widowmaker," though it is a matter of record that ten workers died during her construction; her real nickname was "Hiroshima," after the radioactive toll of her maiden voyage. The first of her class, not just nuclear-powered but armed with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, K-19 was built hastily and haphazardly, rushed through production to catch up with the Americans and the similarly swaggering USS George Washington. During sea trials, her hull coating would peel off, the reactor compartment would flood, the boat's plumbing would clog and fail. Most fatefully, hurrying to install the pipes of the reactor cooling system, some unknown worker in the yard at Severodvinsk let fall a drop of solder on an unprotected pipe, cracking it undetectably—and for want of that particular, microscopic nail, the cooling system would spring a leak while the boat was on maneuvers in the North Atlantic in the summer of 1961. The control rods did only so much to counteract the climbing core temperatures of the aft reactor. There was no backup cooling system; it had been vetoed in the design phase due to time and cost. K-19 is not remembered as Chernobyl at sea only because a team of volunteers, working in short shifts within the reactor room itself, jerry-rigged a new cooling system out of the boat's stores of drinking water before the reactor could melt down. All eight of those men were dead within days of the accident. More than another dozen would die over the next couple of years; the boat was hot as White Sands. The surviving crew to this day suffer from the long-term effects of radiation poisoning, which their medical records for decades passed off as a nervous disorder. The entire incident was classified—the living silenced and the dead off the record—until the fall of the Soviet Union.
I understand wanting to make a movie of this story. It's gripping, it's unsung, it's the bitter kind of heroism that should never have been asked of the men who rose to meet it; for an American audience, it combines good old-fashioned mistrust of the government with faith in the individual and proof that the Russians love their children too. Submarines are inherently suspenseful and so are nuclear reactors and I am far from the only sucker for heroic engineering out there. I also understand that historical accuracy is a nebulous commodity in Hollywood and sometimes the best you can hope for is errors made in good faith rather than disingenuously falsified. I love A Night to Remember (1958) and its docudrama tension that neither simplifies nor amplifies the ill-fated facts, but I have also watched a hell of a lot of Law & Order over the years, where you can sail right up to the edge of libel so long as you make sure to change the names. The thing that confuses me about K-19: The Widowmaker—story by Louis Nowra, screenplay by Christopher Kyle—is the way it splits the difference between these two approaches, right down to the title with its real name and invented epithet. All technical aspects of the disaster are faithfully reproduced from history, from the corner-cutting construction and the overheating reactor to the improvised containment measures and the horrific effects on the crew. As far as I can tell, all of the human aspects are made up. Not just names changed, but histories, personalities, relationships, even some very specific, dramatic decisions. The result, if you know anything about the real K-19, is a compelling but disorienting hybrid of reconstruction and soap. You can feel reality going in and out of focus at different turns of the plot. It gives me just as mixed feelings.
So if I can't take this film as historical witness, what can I do? Appreciate the acting, to start with. I can't say if it's a saving grace or a silver lining, but it's good and I accept that I might not have seen some of it without the script's inventions. Liam Neeson is solid, sensitive, and relatably trapped as Mikhail Polenin, K-19's executive officer and original commander, demoted for protesting the endangerment of his crew in a boat that literally blew a fuse during a drill in drydock, but Harrison Ford is remarkable as his Kremlin-appointed replacement, Captain Alexei Vostrikov. The actor is so well-loved and so comfortable as a maverick, it's clever to cast him as a martinet; it is even more rewarding that he rises to the challenge. There are no roguish mannerisms in a man who has to be the perfect homo sovieticus, seamless and unquestioning in his loyalty to the state. "I was told there are two versions about your father," Polenin says tactfully in a rare moment of downtime between the two men. "One, he was a hero of the Revolution. Two, he died in the gulag." Vostrikov glances over a little, cigarette smoke streaming in the damp winter wind. The slightest wryness comes and goes on his habitually grim face: "Both are true." Like the submarine he captains, Vostrikov cannot admit any weakness. Drinking with his fellow officers the night before K-19's commissioning, Polenin toasted sardonically to the fabled first cosmonaut who "orbited Earth before Yuri Gagarin—but he was not loyal enough to hold his breath when his life support system gave out, so now he never existed," but Vostrikov knows up close and personal how fast a man can be rewritten from hero to disgrace. His entire career, maybe even his politically connected marriage has been an exercise in proving he's not his father's son. If that includes going down with a shoddy, sparking boat he's too experienced a naval officer not to know is a cover-up waiting to happen, then Alexei Vostrikov will be loyal: he'll hold his breath. Of course, there are a hundred and twenty men on K-19 with him who might rather find a way to keep drawing oxygen with or without the approval of the motherland. They are used to easygoing, emotionally available Polenin with his credo that "a crew is a family." Vostrikov's coldly disciplined adherence to the Party line—substituting emergency drills for camaraderie, slideshow lectures from the political officer for motivation, pushing the sub itself to the limits of its creaking frame in a daunting, flamboyant missile test—looks to them like social climbing, sadism, or just plain lunacy. The fact that the audience knows better doesn't actually make us like him for it. It's a part as chilly and brittle as steel in arctic water and Ford gives it no easy cracks of vulnerability, not even when circumstances bear on the commander to alter his inflexible tack. I admire and enjoy this approach. Neeson isn't phoning his performance in, but it's pitched closer to the audience's sympathies. Vostrikov is way out among the moral icebergs and we aren't going to know till the end if he's hero or villain or fool or a little of each, like anyone.
Then there's Bigelow's direction. I'm sure the reason is as dismally simple as "misogyny," but it still puzzles me that she is so permanently associated with James Cameron when as far as I can tell their romance was short-lived, their collaboration Strange Days (1995) has her attention to gender and race all over it, and her eye as a director is entirely her own. I started noticing her flair for different kinds of action scenes with Near Dark (1987), where the roadhouse massacre and the motel shootout and the midnight tractor-trailer showdown each play out with a distinct spatial and emotional clarity, but it's even more on display in K-19: The Widowmaker, in which the killing factors of physics and engineering never alter and never interact the same way twice. The test sequence alluded to above begins with Vostrikov ordering K-19 to a depth of three hundred meters—not quite crush depth, but close enough that the submarine's hull booms and buckles as if under monstrous, invisible blows—and ends with a rolling, white-knuckled, emergency-fast ascent that smashes aside slabs of summer-weak polar ice and seems to swing its momentum straight on into the missile launch, a rocket-fueled follow-through that's just as breathlessly cool as Vostrikov wants to impress on his crew and leaves the audience's heart pounding between elation and dread. Bigelow is also extremely good with chaos, in that we never lose track of objects or people even when the characters don't know what the devil just happened or where it's coming from next. Her certainty carries the movie through some of its more melodramatic passages. There was never a mutiny aboard K-19, but Bigelow shoots this one as though it's just another piece of the boat's bad history, from the fatal accidents in the naval yard to the champagne bottle that didn't break at her christening to the utterly preventable nuclear near-miss itself, and at least until you double-check the history it feels no more unlikely than any of the other shit that hit K-19's fan. I don't know if the crew played football on the ice after the successful missile test, or if the parentally beaming political officer (Ravil Isyanov) really had everyone line up for a group photo, but why not? It is true that the crew of K-19 got some of the best food in the fleet. "Red wine gives you strontium. Or takes it away. Or something. Something good."
These sometimes immiscible measures of reality and invention blend to the best advantage in the scenes around the reactor, which constitute both the technical heart of the movie and a mini-arc for Peter Sarsgaard's Lieutenant Vadim Radtchenko, the top-of-his-class reactor officer posted straight from naval academy to K-19. He's almost an audience stand-in, so bright-eyed and science-proud that it feels like kicking a puppy to suggest he's not fit for the job, but he's replacing "the best reactor officer in the Navy"—sacked without appeal by Vostrikov for being uncharacteristically drunk on duty—without ever having seen a reactor in the wild. He'll get a good view of this one. It's terrifying. A nuclear disaster really doesn't need tricking out and while Bigelow boosts the roar of an oxyacetylene torch and the rasp of human breathing with a shivery a cappella requiem or strings in a few places, for the most part she lets the magnitude of the challenge speak for itself. With the core temperature at 400 °C and rising, the boat has "three or four hours—it could be less" before meltdown becomes unavoidable. The welding of the improvised cooling system will be done by three teams of two men each, working in ten-minute shifts to minimize exposure to the hellish environment. I use the word advisedly. Cherenkov radiation through the steam of the overheated, leaking pipes suffuses the normally sealed area with luminous, uncanny blue—Doctor Manhattan blue, Shiva's throat blue, blue as the ionized air glow Louis Slotin saw at Los Alamos in 1946 when the screwdriver slipped and he tasted hard radiation and the demon core that had killed Harry Daghlian killed him, too, though it took him nine days to die. It doesn't make the reactor look alive, a genie escaping its broken bottle; it makes it look totally uninhabitable, a corrosive, sterilizing light. Hazmat suits would be one step up from wishful thinking here and the crew of K-19 don't even have those: thanks to a shortfall in supplies, they were sent to sea with "chemical suits," not rated for radioactive contamination at all. "They might as well wear raincoats!" Polenin fumes, but distributes the flimsy, rubberized gear among the reactor technicians and their officer anyway. "What else can we do?"
The movie makes sure we understand these hot equations, then stages the shift change so that the second team passes into the reactor's domain without seeing its effects on the first. That's what Vadim is there for, the audience's lens on these young faces as the Chekhov's gun of acute radiation syndrome ("Your hair falls out, or something") comes brutally off the wall. He's scared already, with his book-drilled knowledge of theory and his gaping ignorance of practice. The first thing he yelled when the coolant system blew was "Get me the emergency manual!" Now he sees his comrades on the third watch emerging from the reactor compartment like hollow-eyed ghosts of Hiroshima, blood-blistered, vomiting, eerily aged under their blotched and sweating skin: they are his own death looking back at him from twenty minutes away and he can't take it. When the time comes to pull the useless gas mask over his face and step into that suicidal blue light, Vadim's fast-breathing shivers break into panicked sobbing, blindly struggling with the crewmate who's trying to help him focus and move. The chief engineer (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) slaps him across the face, once clinically and then harder, but the lieutenant is melting down faster than the reactor; all he does when the disgusted Gorelov suits up in his place is cry, clinging to pipes and cables as though he might be thrown to the reactor like a fairy-tale dragon, so terrified that he's beyond shame or reasoning. Even a look of furious contempt from Polenin as the executive officer returns to shepherd the second team to sick bay, equally burnt and doomed, can't make him cringe further. He sits alone in the engine room afterward with his unmarked skin and his clean chemical suit, his face adult enough again to know it. It's a tremendously upsetting and effective scene and I appreciate that when it is, perhaps inevitably, not canceled but counterbalanced by an act of bravery, Bigelow and Sarsgaard take care that Vadim's heroism never looks like steely socialist realism. It could; he's doing single-handed life-saving repairs against a backdrop of fire and mutiny. (I gave you fair warning about the soap.) Jeff Cronenweth's shallow-field, long-shot cinematography doesn't go for classical compositions, but Vadim's fresh-faced enough to look like a Young Pioneer once his mouth firms up. It still trembles, though: he's still terrified. There's no time and no one else to do it and that still doesn't make him good at his job. I can't stand the trope of death by redemption, but Sarsgaard sold it without even giving me flashbacks to In Which We Serve (1942). A snarkier person might be tempted to nominate him for the Van Heflin Memorial Award for Losing One's Shit.
I want to say it's unusual for a genre exercise as macho as K-19: The Widowmaker—for all intents and purposes a war movie—to turn as much on vulnerability as it does. It's not just Vadim; there's a lot in Vostrikov and Polenin's clash of egos and philosophies that reminded me of the imploding masculinity of Tunes of Glory (1960), meaning I worried for much of the runtime that Bigelow's film would end as badly as Neame's does. Instead it seems to argue for rapprochement between the two modes, acknowledging that Polenin's laissez-faire command style left his crew unprepared to cope with real disaster without letting Vostrikov off the hook for making everything worse in his hard-assed, high-handed way. Machismo does not save the day. The gesture that finally enables the crew's loyalty to Vostrikov is not some kind of St. Crispin's inspirational; it's a confession of the commander's fears. A reactor meltdown will turn K-19 into a floating dirty bomb at best, a pillar of fire if Vadim's worst guesses come through. They're so close to the NATO base at Jan Mayen and shadowed by a curious American destroyer that Vostrikov is genuinely afraid they'll start World War III without meaning to, or at least get a couple of cities vaporized before anyone can sort out the truth. A few hours and a sea-change ago, he dressed down the political officer for not doing more to keep up the men's morale: "The crew needs you to show courage, not fear. Fear is contagious." Maybe, but it's also human. His earlier relentless team-building made the crew feel they could depend on each other, but it isn't until they feel that their captain needs them, actually asks them for a collective decision like comrades of that ideal world that the Soviet state so rarely resembled in life, that he's included in their trust. Asking for anything instead of ordering it takes Vostrikov vertiginously out of his comfort zone, however, and Ford wisely avoids making a big moment of it. He's not a demonstrative man, he's never had Polenin's knack of being loved; even his late-blooming glint of a sense of humor ("You know that will be the end of your career," Polenin warns after his commanding officer countermands Moscow's order not to evacuate the by now heavily irradiated submarine. "They'll send you to the gulag, like your father." There's a small pause, and then the expression Vostrikov turns on him is possibly the first intentional straight face of the man's life: "Well, it's a family tradition, isn't it?") is still pretty damn dry. But after two hours of stoneface, even small creases and hesitations of hope or uncertainty or heartbreak flash out like semaphores, and all we need is to see them. I don't know if it's especially Russian, but it's unmistakable irony that the crew of K-19 achieve this sense of community only at the point when there's no more K-19 to be the crew of. But submarines are decommissioned and scrapped, concealed and forgotten. Twenty-eight, forty-one years later, the community is all you have.
Of course there are clichés. If you have a fiancée in this genre, you might as well pay down on a headstone before you leave port; if you're going to bring a pet on board a nuclear submarine, just spare everyone the metaphor and make it a canary. A lot of the small moments are nicely observed, as when one sailor talking longingly of seeing the sun and the stars learns that his bunkmate will be going right back to the family coal mine once he's mustered out, "so it's all the same to me." A lot of the broader moments, like the timing of a fire or the topside crew mooning an American helicopter, that's a thing. I would also be remiss if I did not mention the accents. None of the non-Russian actors attempt a full Russian accent, thank God, but neither do they use their own accents in the accepted convention of non-English languages represented as English; instead they sound mostly like themselves with varying Russian inflections and a couple of characteristic vowel sounds and once again I won't say it doesn't work, but who decided it was the best practice? I know little about this film's production, but I wondered at various points about development hell or studio interference. Nothing else should explain the mushy, superfluous epilogue which drags the story out through Vostrikov's trial and several intertitles and eventually into a post-Soviet cemetery where the survivors of K-19 gather to mourn their fallen comrades with all the uncomplicated nationalism the script had heretofore dodged. It's all the more frustrating since the film has a perfect closing shot about ten minutes previous, a moment of immense, weary triumph and ambiguity as the camera spirals out from a pair of Soviet submarines side by side in the glacier-blue water, whatever the men on the decks are saying to one another fading into the orchestral sweep of Klaus Badelt's score and the hovering blades of the U.S. Navy chopper, like the destroyer on the horizon present for this story but not part of it, and now we're on the outside, too.
So I'm still thinking about K-19: The Widowmaker vs. "Hiroshima" K-19. On the one hand, it's history. You don't fake it. You especially don't fake it when there are survivors and families and the dead whose lead-coffined reality was nothing but rumors and samizdat for years. If you're going to tell that story, tell it true. On the other, however historically twitchy it makes me, I can see the argument for fictionalizing the captain and his crew as a way of dramatizing the conflicting drives behind K-19's predicament, putting the ideas right there in the water instead of abstractly behind a desk. My personal jury's still out. I suspect I would have been happier if the film had either stuck more authentically to the facts of K-19 or filed the rest of the serial numbers off and run exactly the same script with a fictional Hotel-class submarine, so that there was no danger of confusing the two. All the same, it provides one of the best pieces of acting I've ever seen from Harrison Ford and further incentive to find the memoirs of K-19's real-life commander Nikolai Vladimirovich Zateyev, who died of cancer in 1998. Not to mention more movies by Kathryn Bigelow. This version brought to you by my traditional backers at Patreon.
There was a real Hotel-class submarine designated K-19, ordered by the Soviet Navy in 1957 and launched in 1959. She was never nicknamed "the Widowmaker," though it is a matter of record that ten workers died during her construction; her real nickname was "Hiroshima," after the radioactive toll of her maiden voyage. The first of her class, not just nuclear-powered but armed with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, K-19 was built hastily and haphazardly, rushed through production to catch up with the Americans and the similarly swaggering USS George Washington. During sea trials, her hull coating would peel off, the reactor compartment would flood, the boat's plumbing would clog and fail. Most fatefully, hurrying to install the pipes of the reactor cooling system, some unknown worker in the yard at Severodvinsk let fall a drop of solder on an unprotected pipe, cracking it undetectably—and for want of that particular, microscopic nail, the cooling system would spring a leak while the boat was on maneuvers in the North Atlantic in the summer of 1961. The control rods did only so much to counteract the climbing core temperatures of the aft reactor. There was no backup cooling system; it had been vetoed in the design phase due to time and cost. K-19 is not remembered as Chernobyl at sea only because a team of volunteers, working in short shifts within the reactor room itself, jerry-rigged a new cooling system out of the boat's stores of drinking water before the reactor could melt down. All eight of those men were dead within days of the accident. More than another dozen would die over the next couple of years; the boat was hot as White Sands. The surviving crew to this day suffer from the long-term effects of radiation poisoning, which their medical records for decades passed off as a nervous disorder. The entire incident was classified—the living silenced and the dead off the record—until the fall of the Soviet Union.
I understand wanting to make a movie of this story. It's gripping, it's unsung, it's the bitter kind of heroism that should never have been asked of the men who rose to meet it; for an American audience, it combines good old-fashioned mistrust of the government with faith in the individual and proof that the Russians love their children too. Submarines are inherently suspenseful and so are nuclear reactors and I am far from the only sucker for heroic engineering out there. I also understand that historical accuracy is a nebulous commodity in Hollywood and sometimes the best you can hope for is errors made in good faith rather than disingenuously falsified. I love A Night to Remember (1958) and its docudrama tension that neither simplifies nor amplifies the ill-fated facts, but I have also watched a hell of a lot of Law & Order over the years, where you can sail right up to the edge of libel so long as you make sure to change the names. The thing that confuses me about K-19: The Widowmaker—story by Louis Nowra, screenplay by Christopher Kyle—is the way it splits the difference between these two approaches, right down to the title with its real name and invented epithet. All technical aspects of the disaster are faithfully reproduced from history, from the corner-cutting construction and the overheating reactor to the improvised containment measures and the horrific effects on the crew. As far as I can tell, all of the human aspects are made up. Not just names changed, but histories, personalities, relationships, even some very specific, dramatic decisions. The result, if you know anything about the real K-19, is a compelling but disorienting hybrid of reconstruction and soap. You can feel reality going in and out of focus at different turns of the plot. It gives me just as mixed feelings.
So if I can't take this film as historical witness, what can I do? Appreciate the acting, to start with. I can't say if it's a saving grace or a silver lining, but it's good and I accept that I might not have seen some of it without the script's inventions. Liam Neeson is solid, sensitive, and relatably trapped as Mikhail Polenin, K-19's executive officer and original commander, demoted for protesting the endangerment of his crew in a boat that literally blew a fuse during a drill in drydock, but Harrison Ford is remarkable as his Kremlin-appointed replacement, Captain Alexei Vostrikov. The actor is so well-loved and so comfortable as a maverick, it's clever to cast him as a martinet; it is even more rewarding that he rises to the challenge. There are no roguish mannerisms in a man who has to be the perfect homo sovieticus, seamless and unquestioning in his loyalty to the state. "I was told there are two versions about your father," Polenin says tactfully in a rare moment of downtime between the two men. "One, he was a hero of the Revolution. Two, he died in the gulag." Vostrikov glances over a little, cigarette smoke streaming in the damp winter wind. The slightest wryness comes and goes on his habitually grim face: "Both are true." Like the submarine he captains, Vostrikov cannot admit any weakness. Drinking with his fellow officers the night before K-19's commissioning, Polenin toasted sardonically to the fabled first cosmonaut who "orbited Earth before Yuri Gagarin—but he was not loyal enough to hold his breath when his life support system gave out, so now he never existed," but Vostrikov knows up close and personal how fast a man can be rewritten from hero to disgrace. His entire career, maybe even his politically connected marriage has been an exercise in proving he's not his father's son. If that includes going down with a shoddy, sparking boat he's too experienced a naval officer not to know is a cover-up waiting to happen, then Alexei Vostrikov will be loyal: he'll hold his breath. Of course, there are a hundred and twenty men on K-19 with him who might rather find a way to keep drawing oxygen with or without the approval of the motherland. They are used to easygoing, emotionally available Polenin with his credo that "a crew is a family." Vostrikov's coldly disciplined adherence to the Party line—substituting emergency drills for camaraderie, slideshow lectures from the political officer for motivation, pushing the sub itself to the limits of its creaking frame in a daunting, flamboyant missile test—looks to them like social climbing, sadism, or just plain lunacy. The fact that the audience knows better doesn't actually make us like him for it. It's a part as chilly and brittle as steel in arctic water and Ford gives it no easy cracks of vulnerability, not even when circumstances bear on the commander to alter his inflexible tack. I admire and enjoy this approach. Neeson isn't phoning his performance in, but it's pitched closer to the audience's sympathies. Vostrikov is way out among the moral icebergs and we aren't going to know till the end if he's hero or villain or fool or a little of each, like anyone.
Then there's Bigelow's direction. I'm sure the reason is as dismally simple as "misogyny," but it still puzzles me that she is so permanently associated with James Cameron when as far as I can tell their romance was short-lived, their collaboration Strange Days (1995) has her attention to gender and race all over it, and her eye as a director is entirely her own. I started noticing her flair for different kinds of action scenes with Near Dark (1987), where the roadhouse massacre and the motel shootout and the midnight tractor-trailer showdown each play out with a distinct spatial and emotional clarity, but it's even more on display in K-19: The Widowmaker, in which the killing factors of physics and engineering never alter and never interact the same way twice. The test sequence alluded to above begins with Vostrikov ordering K-19 to a depth of three hundred meters—not quite crush depth, but close enough that the submarine's hull booms and buckles as if under monstrous, invisible blows—and ends with a rolling, white-knuckled, emergency-fast ascent that smashes aside slabs of summer-weak polar ice and seems to swing its momentum straight on into the missile launch, a rocket-fueled follow-through that's just as breathlessly cool as Vostrikov wants to impress on his crew and leaves the audience's heart pounding between elation and dread. Bigelow is also extremely good with chaos, in that we never lose track of objects or people even when the characters don't know what the devil just happened or where it's coming from next. Her certainty carries the movie through some of its more melodramatic passages. There was never a mutiny aboard K-19, but Bigelow shoots this one as though it's just another piece of the boat's bad history, from the fatal accidents in the naval yard to the champagne bottle that didn't break at her christening to the utterly preventable nuclear near-miss itself, and at least until you double-check the history it feels no more unlikely than any of the other shit that hit K-19's fan. I don't know if the crew played football on the ice after the successful missile test, or if the parentally beaming political officer (Ravil Isyanov) really had everyone line up for a group photo, but why not? It is true that the crew of K-19 got some of the best food in the fleet. "Red wine gives you strontium. Or takes it away. Or something. Something good."
These sometimes immiscible measures of reality and invention blend to the best advantage in the scenes around the reactor, which constitute both the technical heart of the movie and a mini-arc for Peter Sarsgaard's Lieutenant Vadim Radtchenko, the top-of-his-class reactor officer posted straight from naval academy to K-19. He's almost an audience stand-in, so bright-eyed and science-proud that it feels like kicking a puppy to suggest he's not fit for the job, but he's replacing "the best reactor officer in the Navy"—sacked without appeal by Vostrikov for being uncharacteristically drunk on duty—without ever having seen a reactor in the wild. He'll get a good view of this one. It's terrifying. A nuclear disaster really doesn't need tricking out and while Bigelow boosts the roar of an oxyacetylene torch and the rasp of human breathing with a shivery a cappella requiem or strings in a few places, for the most part she lets the magnitude of the challenge speak for itself. With the core temperature at 400 °C and rising, the boat has "three or four hours—it could be less" before meltdown becomes unavoidable. The welding of the improvised cooling system will be done by three teams of two men each, working in ten-minute shifts to minimize exposure to the hellish environment. I use the word advisedly. Cherenkov radiation through the steam of the overheated, leaking pipes suffuses the normally sealed area with luminous, uncanny blue—Doctor Manhattan blue, Shiva's throat blue, blue as the ionized air glow Louis Slotin saw at Los Alamos in 1946 when the screwdriver slipped and he tasted hard radiation and the demon core that had killed Harry Daghlian killed him, too, though it took him nine days to die. It doesn't make the reactor look alive, a genie escaping its broken bottle; it makes it look totally uninhabitable, a corrosive, sterilizing light. Hazmat suits would be one step up from wishful thinking here and the crew of K-19 don't even have those: thanks to a shortfall in supplies, they were sent to sea with "chemical suits," not rated for radioactive contamination at all. "They might as well wear raincoats!" Polenin fumes, but distributes the flimsy, rubberized gear among the reactor technicians and their officer anyway. "What else can we do?"
The movie makes sure we understand these hot equations, then stages the shift change so that the second team passes into the reactor's domain without seeing its effects on the first. That's what Vadim is there for, the audience's lens on these young faces as the Chekhov's gun of acute radiation syndrome ("Your hair falls out, or something") comes brutally off the wall. He's scared already, with his book-drilled knowledge of theory and his gaping ignorance of practice. The first thing he yelled when the coolant system blew was "Get me the emergency manual!" Now he sees his comrades on the third watch emerging from the reactor compartment like hollow-eyed ghosts of Hiroshima, blood-blistered, vomiting, eerily aged under their blotched and sweating skin: they are his own death looking back at him from twenty minutes away and he can't take it. When the time comes to pull the useless gas mask over his face and step into that suicidal blue light, Vadim's fast-breathing shivers break into panicked sobbing, blindly struggling with the crewmate who's trying to help him focus and move. The chief engineer (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) slaps him across the face, once clinically and then harder, but the lieutenant is melting down faster than the reactor; all he does when the disgusted Gorelov suits up in his place is cry, clinging to pipes and cables as though he might be thrown to the reactor like a fairy-tale dragon, so terrified that he's beyond shame or reasoning. Even a look of furious contempt from Polenin as the executive officer returns to shepherd the second team to sick bay, equally burnt and doomed, can't make him cringe further. He sits alone in the engine room afterward with his unmarked skin and his clean chemical suit, his face adult enough again to know it. It's a tremendously upsetting and effective scene and I appreciate that when it is, perhaps inevitably, not canceled but counterbalanced by an act of bravery, Bigelow and Sarsgaard take care that Vadim's heroism never looks like steely socialist realism. It could; he's doing single-handed life-saving repairs against a backdrop of fire and mutiny. (I gave you fair warning about the soap.) Jeff Cronenweth's shallow-field, long-shot cinematography doesn't go for classical compositions, but Vadim's fresh-faced enough to look like a Young Pioneer once his mouth firms up. It still trembles, though: he's still terrified. There's no time and no one else to do it and that still doesn't make him good at his job. I can't stand the trope of death by redemption, but Sarsgaard sold it without even giving me flashbacks to In Which We Serve (1942). A snarkier person might be tempted to nominate him for the Van Heflin Memorial Award for Losing One's Shit.
I want to say it's unusual for a genre exercise as macho as K-19: The Widowmaker—for all intents and purposes a war movie—to turn as much on vulnerability as it does. It's not just Vadim; there's a lot in Vostrikov and Polenin's clash of egos and philosophies that reminded me of the imploding masculinity of Tunes of Glory (1960), meaning I worried for much of the runtime that Bigelow's film would end as badly as Neame's does. Instead it seems to argue for rapprochement between the two modes, acknowledging that Polenin's laissez-faire command style left his crew unprepared to cope with real disaster without letting Vostrikov off the hook for making everything worse in his hard-assed, high-handed way. Machismo does not save the day. The gesture that finally enables the crew's loyalty to Vostrikov is not some kind of St. Crispin's inspirational; it's a confession of the commander's fears. A reactor meltdown will turn K-19 into a floating dirty bomb at best, a pillar of fire if Vadim's worst guesses come through. They're so close to the NATO base at Jan Mayen and shadowed by a curious American destroyer that Vostrikov is genuinely afraid they'll start World War III without meaning to, or at least get a couple of cities vaporized before anyone can sort out the truth. A few hours and a sea-change ago, he dressed down the political officer for not doing more to keep up the men's morale: "The crew needs you to show courage, not fear. Fear is contagious." Maybe, but it's also human. His earlier relentless team-building made the crew feel they could depend on each other, but it isn't until they feel that their captain needs them, actually asks them for a collective decision like comrades of that ideal world that the Soviet state so rarely resembled in life, that he's included in their trust. Asking for anything instead of ordering it takes Vostrikov vertiginously out of his comfort zone, however, and Ford wisely avoids making a big moment of it. He's not a demonstrative man, he's never had Polenin's knack of being loved; even his late-blooming glint of a sense of humor ("You know that will be the end of your career," Polenin warns after his commanding officer countermands Moscow's order not to evacuate the by now heavily irradiated submarine. "They'll send you to the gulag, like your father." There's a small pause, and then the expression Vostrikov turns on him is possibly the first intentional straight face of the man's life: "Well, it's a family tradition, isn't it?") is still pretty damn dry. But after two hours of stoneface, even small creases and hesitations of hope or uncertainty or heartbreak flash out like semaphores, and all we need is to see them. I don't know if it's especially Russian, but it's unmistakable irony that the crew of K-19 achieve this sense of community only at the point when there's no more K-19 to be the crew of. But submarines are decommissioned and scrapped, concealed and forgotten. Twenty-eight, forty-one years later, the community is all you have.
Of course there are clichés. If you have a fiancée in this genre, you might as well pay down on a headstone before you leave port; if you're going to bring a pet on board a nuclear submarine, just spare everyone the metaphor and make it a canary. A lot of the small moments are nicely observed, as when one sailor talking longingly of seeing the sun and the stars learns that his bunkmate will be going right back to the family coal mine once he's mustered out, "so it's all the same to me." A lot of the broader moments, like the timing of a fire or the topside crew mooning an American helicopter, that's a thing. I would also be remiss if I did not mention the accents. None of the non-Russian actors attempt a full Russian accent, thank God, but neither do they use their own accents in the accepted convention of non-English languages represented as English; instead they sound mostly like themselves with varying Russian inflections and a couple of characteristic vowel sounds and once again I won't say it doesn't work, but who decided it was the best practice? I know little about this film's production, but I wondered at various points about development hell or studio interference. Nothing else should explain the mushy, superfluous epilogue which drags the story out through Vostrikov's trial and several intertitles and eventually into a post-Soviet cemetery where the survivors of K-19 gather to mourn their fallen comrades with all the uncomplicated nationalism the script had heretofore dodged. It's all the more frustrating since the film has a perfect closing shot about ten minutes previous, a moment of immense, weary triumph and ambiguity as the camera spirals out from a pair of Soviet submarines side by side in the glacier-blue water, whatever the men on the decks are saying to one another fading into the orchestral sweep of Klaus Badelt's score and the hovering blades of the U.S. Navy chopper, like the destroyer on the horizon present for this story but not part of it, and now we're on the outside, too.
So I'm still thinking about K-19: The Widowmaker vs. "Hiroshima" K-19. On the one hand, it's history. You don't fake it. You especially don't fake it when there are survivors and families and the dead whose lead-coffined reality was nothing but rumors and samizdat for years. If you're going to tell that story, tell it true. On the other, however historically twitchy it makes me, I can see the argument for fictionalizing the captain and his crew as a way of dramatizing the conflicting drives behind K-19's predicament, putting the ideas right there in the water instead of abstractly behind a desk. My personal jury's still out. I suspect I would have been happier if the film had either stuck more authentically to the facts of K-19 or filed the rest of the serial numbers off and run exactly the same script with a fictional Hotel-class submarine, so that there was no danger of confusing the two. All the same, it provides one of the best pieces of acting I've ever seen from Harrison Ford and further incentive to find the memoirs of K-19's real-life commander Nikolai Vladimirovich Zateyev, who died of cancer in 1998. Not to mention more movies by Kathryn Bigelow. This version brought to you by my traditional backers at Patreon.
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Very much the other end of the nuclear process, but I don't think I've blogged yet about the TV show Manhattan, and it might interest you: a look inside the Manhattan District while they were developing the bomb, dividing its attention between the science and the politics thereof (whose design and research gets funding and support and so forth) and the social aspect of the families dragged out to the middle of nowhere so their husbands and fathers can work on a project so hush-hush, all the wives leap like starving coyotes on one woman letting slip that they're "building" something. It also dives into soap toward the end, when the script takes a headlong charge at the espionage side of the situation, but before that it gives you things like late-night reconciliations between two rival scientists, both exhausted and despondent, confessing that neither of their designs works. Very Apollo 13 in places, now that I think about it.
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That's a completely legitimate approach to a movie and probably one shared by most of its audience! Taken separately from its history, I think it's a strong, slightly melodramatic, interestingly elegiac action movie that functions a lot like a summer blockbuster except where it really, really doesn't. I just couldn't take it separately from its history because I knew the history first. I didn't (and still don't) know all the details, but I had a clear enough picture to clock the major divergences, so my experience of the movie was a kind of constantly rotating magic eight-ball: Harrison Ford is really talented Peter Sarsgaard is really talented Liam Neeson is almost certainly really talented he's just got a less showy part to work with okay that happened that's not at all true I think something like that happened a couple of years later well that's a distressingly accurate representation of radiation sickness that's fictitious but I don't think I care that's fictitious and I feel awkward about the political implications OKAY THOSE EIGHT THINGS IN A ROW DID NOT HAPPEN that's quite true Harrison Ford is really talented where did this epilogue come from oh God make it stop. I enjoyed the movie very much, but I think its degree of fictionalization will always feel weird and somewhat inexplicable to me. We may also have different parameters for departures from the historical record; there are cases where it really doesn't bother me and cases where I mind a lot and sometimes they overlap with other people's preferences and sometimes they don't. [edit] And I may be sensitized right now to the idea of rewriting/overwriting the past, I can't imagine why. I have no idea how I would have felt about this movie in 2002, no matter what I knew. In 2002, I did not watch that many movies.
Now I'm inclined to watch it again for the performances, except I remember feeling sick to my stomach watching them rig the cooling system, and that's the kind of impressive storytelling I'm not sure I want to subject myself to more than once.
It's pretty racking. I found the performances worth it, but of course the two are part of one another.
It also dives into soap toward the end, when the script takes a headlong charge at the espionage side of the situation, but before that it gives you things like late-night reconciliations between two rival scientists, both exhausted and despondent, confessing that neither of their designs works. Very Apollo 13 in places, now that I think about it.
I've heard of Manhattan and not felt like seeing it for reasons similar to the setup of K-19: The Widowmaker, actually, but I am glad you have been enjoying it. The aspects you describe sound attractive. You should definitely blog about it when you get the chance.
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This was me and the film of Howl's Moving Castle. I spent months before I saw it deliberately referring to it as Hauru no ugoku shiro not because I wanted to be a snob, but because I was trying to program myself to take it on its own terms, rather than judging it as an adaptation of the novel. But then I watched it and the first half of the film was too much like the book for me not to think of it in those terms, and so when it took a screeching hairpin turn at Wizard Suliman (I believe the words that came out of my mouth were "You're supposed to be a man, and dead"), I wasn't able to go with it.
We may also have different parameters for departures from the historical record; there are cases where it really doesn't bother me and cases where I mind a lot and sometimes they overlap with other people's preferences and sometimes they don't.
We all have our own things we stick on and the ones we can just roll with. After studying Elizabethan history for Midnight Never Come I went back and re-watched Elizabeth (the one with Cate Blanchett) and discovered I still love it even though now I can point to all the places where it compresses or gets things just plain wrong. But then I tried to watch The Tudors and had my own 8-ball reaction -- or more like ping-pong, maybe, as I ricocheted between "WHY ARE NONE OF YOU WEARING LINEN" and "jfc, did you seriously go to the effort of putting the top story back on the front gatehouse of Hampton Court Palace?"
I've heard of Manhattan and not felt like seeing it for reasons similar to the setup of K-19: The Widowmaker, actually
Yes, after posting that I thought, "waitasec, the odds that she knows enough about the Manhattan Project to have the same problem here are quite high." I had missed that comment thread, though.
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I have never seen the film of Howl's Moving Castle for exactly that reason. The novel was one of my major, formative, to this day important books and I knew I wouldn't be able to separate from the film from all the ways it was, as a version of the novel, wrong. Which would not be fair to the movie and not pleasant for me, so I just re-read the book.
After studying Elizabethan history for Midnight Never Come I went back and re-watched Elizabeth (the one with Cate Blanchett) and discovered I still love it even though now I can point to all the places where it compresses or gets things just plain wrong.
I'm glad it held up. I feel like it's rare for research to kill a beloved piece of art, but it's incredibly upsetting when it happens.
But then I tried to watch The Tudors and had my own 8-ball reaction -- or more like ping-pong, maybe, as I ricocheted between "WHY ARE NONE OF YOU WEARING LINEN" and "jfc, did you seriously go to the effort of putting the top story back on the front gatehouse of Hampton Court Palace?"
. . . what were they wearing instead?
I have not heard salutory things about the historicity of The Tudors, which is one of the reasons I am dreading the prospect of Michael Hirst taking on the Caesars. If I want a wildly entertaining, history-negligible soap opera about the Julio-Claudians, I, Claudius is right there and has been since 1976. And if for some reason I don't feel like I, Claudius, there's Rome. We're done here.
Yes, after posting that I thought, "waitasec, the odds that she knows enough about the Manhattan Project to have the same problem here are quite high." I had missed that comment thread, though.
It's all right! I don't expect everyone to read every post I make. The Manhattan Project is both something in which I have been interested for a long time and something which I actively researched for a story (because all of my historical fiction involves too much research, I don't have the knack of the casual historical detail), so I have feelings about it.
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You made the right choice; I wish I'd done the same. I mean, it in no way harmed the book for me: I still love it every bit as much as I did before (beause yeah, major, formative, to this day important). But that was an hour or so of "WTF WWII METAPHOR AHOY" I didn't need to subject myself to.
I'm glad it held up. I feel like it's rare for research to kill a beloved piece of art, but it's incredibly upsetting when it happens.
Given that merely growing up can cause the Suck Fairy to visit a beloved piece of art, it's a non-trivial risk. It helps that I feel like the film's story is in many ways thematically correct; that makes it easier to forgive the places where specifics go wrong (which they most egregiously do when they show Elizabeth cutting ties with people she emphatically did not ever eject from her life). Whereas I stayed far away from Anonymous because as far as I'm concerned, it commits character assassination on both Shakespeare (he actually didn't write his plays!) and Elizabeth (sekrit babby!)
. . . what were they wearing instead?
Nobody wears any underclothes at all. They just have on their doublets and dresses and so forth, right against their skin, so when somebody tears those off (as they do with regularity), it's instant nakedness. Which is probably why nobody is wearing any linen, because that would mean it takes too long to get to the boobs.
If I want a wildly entertaining, history-negligible soap opera about the Julio-Claudians, I, Claudius is right there and has been since 1976. And if for some reason I don't feel like I, Claudius, there's Rome. We're done here.
Pretty much, yeah. (I sort of want to watch Rome just for the visuals. I love having the opportunity to immerse myself in what a historical place and time might have looked like, even if the story is made of ricotta that's gone off.)
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That's terrible, but I'm laughing.
Whereas I stayed far away from Anonymous because as far as I'm concerned, it commits character assassination on both Shakespeare (he actually didn't write his plays!) and Elizabeth (sekrit babby!)
Yeah no. Did I ever mention that I wrote Marlowe/Shakespeare slash to cope with the existence of that movie? I did.
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I know Bigelow's had a Best Director Oscar, but I still feel she's a generally overlooked and underrated director. I do need to make more of an effort to catch up on her work, because, as we talked about, The Hurt Locker is an absolutely fascinating possible-failure of a film in comparison to this one, and anyone who can literally make two equal and opposite mistakes of that degree of interest is worth paying closer attention to.
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Thank you. I don't think I've read "The Green Hills of Earth" in decades, so I'll remedy that.
I do need to make more of an effort to catch up on her work, because, as we talked about, The Hurt Locker is an absolutely fascinating possible-failure of a film in comparison to this one, and anyone who can literally make two equal and opposite mistakes of that degree of interest is worth paying closer attention to.
Your description made me want to see The Hurt Locker, both for Jeremy Renner and the compare-and-contrast. She also has a lot in her early filmography that looks fascinating—The Loveless (1982) gave Willem Defoe his first starring role as a '50's biker, Blue Steel (1990) is a serial killer/vigilante cop thriller starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and Point Break (1991) appears to be a neo-noir about surfing, with Keanu Reeves. If those movies live up to their premises, I'm going to wonder why I've never heard of her as a great pulp filmmaker as well as all the rest.
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It is weird, watching historical things where you know a reasonable amount about it (depending on how it's tackled). It's mostly okay if you're blissfully ignorant and find out after, if it's accurate, and then sometimes no matter how inaccurate it's okay, because it is (and you can see why, I suppose). And then there are other times as you describe, and they're always rather awkward. (I have a similar response to ITV'S Victoria for different reasons - it's all beautifully made and played but so very candy-coated, and when it comes to the more political aspects - things that are frequently still at the basis of so many current political issues - I'm going aargh, because how can you put such a sugar frosting on starvation and empire and massacres and inequality? But still watching, because it's so pretty and such a great cast. (They're recently wheeled in Diana Rigg, presumably just to stop me even thinking of giving it up.)
I recently watched The White Princess (as has been fairly obvious) and at least that had the decency just to be generally terrible alongside being about as inaccurate as it's possible to be without deliberately setting things in an alternate reality, which is also much more straightfoward to deal with!
(Otherwise I have nothing to say because while I like bottle-episode type scenarios and a bit of everyone is doomed at times (and happily am currently in that state of ignorant bliss which would enable it), I unfortunately get very claustrophobic when watching things set in submarines or any other small metallic spaces where you can't breathe the air, which is a bit of a barrier to some otherwise very good things. You can be locked in somewhere and under pressure, that's great, but there needs to be air!)
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I suspect you're right that it's easier to have your first exposure to a story be the fictional one: you can adjust for reality afterward. The alternative, you can spend the entire movie going "Hey! Wait! No!" I have certainly been introduced to any amount of history by fiction and I don't think it's hurt my ability to process the history any.
(They're recently wheeled in Diana Rigg, presumably just to stop me even thinking of giving it up.)
Yeah, that's just unfair.
I recently watched The White Princess (as has been fairly obvious) and at least that had the decency just to be generally terrible alongside being about as inaccurate as it's possible to be without deliberately setting things in an alternate reality, which is also much more straightfoward to deal with!
Agreed! At least that way you're not torn between the inaccuracy and the artistry. (As I recall, your posts on that one started by noting the ahistorical bonus rape and went from there.)
I unfortunately get very claustrophobic when watching things set in submarines or any other small metallic spaces where you can't breathe the air, which is a bit of a barrier to some otherwise very good things. You can be locked in somewhere and under pressure, that's great, but there needs to be air!
So noted. I will not recommend you any submarine or space movies any time soon.
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Yes, it's only when we already know - pretty much the same as with adaptations! (And then those of us who know will still argue over which ones were great and which ones took the unforgivable liberties.)
Yeah, that's just unfair.
Underhand tactics, yes! (I am a split person, one half enjoying it very much indeed, and the other half criticising everything! Possibly both halves are therefore hypocrites. Actually, I didn't mind with S1 at all, because if you want to sugar fairy tale something, the story of an 18 yr old girl suddenly coming to the throne is a natural fit, and the Melbourne/Victoria romance was ridiculous but also involved Rufus Sewell and Jenna Coleman, so was pretty great). It was only at the end when they announced there'd be a S2, I was like, OH DEAR. Because that couldn't end well...)
At least that way you're not torn between the inaccuracy and the artistry. (As I recall, your posts on that one started by noting the ahistorical bonus rape and went from there.)
LOL, no. In this case you could only feel sorry for the actors who deserved better! (There was also a lot of ahistorical murdering of multiple people, imaginary babies, and Margaret the Ninja Duchess of Burgundy, who apparently liked to sneak across the Channel to cause trouble.) The costumes were also pretty ahistorical.
So noted. I will not recommend you any submarine or space movies any time soon.
Well, you can recommend them! They just have to wait for a very good moment! (It's exacerbated currently by my illness generally and specially by the fact that it's impossible for me to watch a film in one go, so you have to stretch out the tension over days till I'm done!)
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I've heard good things! How do you feel about the miniseries?
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"Ford even looks like our captain"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/feb/23/filmnews.russia
https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-a-2002-07-19-3-original-66291562/541262.html
But this is the really interesting one, archived from the St Petersburg Times
http://archive.is/iqKyb
In Russia, however, the original script proposal for K-19 sparked an angry reaction from a number of the crew members who had the chance to read it.
One of the veterans' chief concerns was the conflict between Ford's character and that of Neeson, who played the second-in-command on the boat. While it forms the dramatic center of the movie, K-19 veterans say that no such conflict ever took place.
The veterans also protested against the portrayal of the crew as a bunch of swearing, drunken and undisciplined Russian sailors, saying that it came from stereotypical Hollywood portrayals of the Soviet Union and in no way reflected the reality on the submarine.
They went so far as to demand that their real names not be used, and that the name of the submarine and the date of the accident be changed for the film. They also petitioned the head of the Russian Navy, Vladimir Kuroyedov, not to allow filming to take place at Russian Navy bases.
"If we had the type of crew that was portrayed in the first script, the submarine would have sunk before it even had a chance to leave port," said Valentin Shabanov, 70, a navigator on the K-19.
Since filming at the port of Murmansk, in the north of Russia, was prohibited, the scenes at sea were shot in Canadian waters.
Bigalow listened to the complaints and, while the central dramatic conflict remained, the script was altered somewhat to address the veterans' concerns.
"I'm so happy that Kathryn Bigalow paid attention to our input," said Ninel Kozyreva, the widow of Anatoly Kozyrev, one of the officers who went into the radioactive reactorcompartment. He died in 1970 from radiation poisoning.
"We have been apprehensive for the last two years, fearing how our beloved husbands would be portrayed in the film," she said.
While the veterans and their widows were pleased that the script had been changed, the inclusion of the conflict between the captain and his second-in-command still disturbed some.
"There's no way that a captain could be handcuffed on board a Soviet submarine by his own crew, as the movie portrays," Mukhin said. "We didn't even have handcuffs on subs."
Mukhin added that not only was the captain never locked up, but NATO forces never detected the presence of the K-19 near its bases or offered rescue help, as shown in the film.
"Every film based on actual events is usually a synthesis of the real facts and fiction," said Neeson, who confessed that he was very nervous before the K-19 veterans saw the premiere. "Unfortunately, often the true facts alone do not make good drama for a movie."
Re: "Ford even looks like our captain"
Thank you! That does seem to explain some of what I was seeing, although not the decision to fictionalize so much in the first place. I'm glad the survivors and their families felt listened to and I'm glad they felt the finished movie respected what they had endured, however loosely it was represented; I'm not surprised the Hollywood embroidery still stuck out. "We didn't even have handcuffs on subs."
I was not able to find any script drafts or shooting scripts to refer to while writing this post, so it's interesting also to see the fossils of/responses to the survivors' objections in the script that was actually produced. There is no shipboard vodka-drinking that I can remember in the film; there is red wine served at meals, which the sailors take solely as a mark of Moscow's esteem for them until one of the senior reactor technicians points out it's "because we're sitting on a pile of uranium." The boat's original reactor officer is drunk on duty, but that's unusual enough that Polenin is worried more about him than about the effect on the mission, at least until Vostrikov demands a replacement and Vadim is what they get. I can't remember if there was card-playing, but if so it plays like a normal leisure activity, not slacking off on duty. The Guardian's "panic scene after the alarm is sounded, with crew members reaching for the instruction book" stayed in, but it's Vadim specifically and, well, Vadim panics.
Ford did look like Zateyev. You can tell even from the small blurry Wikipedia photo. I'm so glad Bigelow was able to get him:
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The K-19 was gutted. Food stores, clothing, equipment and sailors' possessions were stacked on a barge and moored off the Kola Peninsula. Signs declared the barge off-limits, but without explaining the danger.
Word spread to enlisted men on construction duty in nearby cities; they heard of an unguarded barge full of new boots, fine chocolates, fluffy towels and crates of vodka. In a matter of days, dawn broke on a near-empty barge.
"Who knows what became of those builders, once they'd sampled the delicacies of that damned barge," Zateyev said.
and
For years, Russians knew the story of the K-19 only through underground songs
http://articles.latimes.com/1994-01-03/news/mn-8123_1_soviet-nuclear-submarine/2
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I'm happy to be a vector! There seems to have been an English-language tie-in book that incorporated at least some of Zateyev's memoirs, so that's on my radar now. If I'm lucky, there's a complete published translation, and it certainly sounds like interviews could have been conducted with the survivors in the early '90's when the story broke. I can only cross my fingers someone collected the songs.
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Cool. I've seen and liked three of her movies now—Strange Days, Near Dark, and K-19: The Widowmaker—so I am inclined to keep watching. I assume at some point I'll hit something of hers that just doesn't work for me, because that's art, but it has not happened so far.
I remember seeing Zero Dark Thirty on a first (and last) date, of all things, and for a CIA-backed propaganda film it's surprisingly ambivalent and complex (and also was my introduction to Jessica Chastain).
(Actually CIA-backed? That does not traditionally produce good movies.)
My favourite of Bigelow's is still Strange Days, though.
Strange Days is wonderful. It's playing at the HFA next month and
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Well, the CIA definitely approved changes to the script and some of the research process for the film seems unethical, to say the least. Chastain is magnificent in the part, though. It was difficult for me to take my eyes off her on screen. Performances were good all round but I barely remember anyone being in that film but her.
Strange Days is wonderful. It's playing at the HFA next month and [personal profile] rushthatspeaks and I have plans; they've never seen it and I've seen it once on my computer. It has one of my favorite soundtracks in the sense of songs rather than score. (Juliette Lewis' PJ Harvey!)
Oh, exciting! Strange Days is such a perfect slice of the 90s and even beyond enjoying the plot and the sound and the filming choices, everyone in that film is so unutterably pretty. I first saw it on VHS tape. It was like someone had filmed my id and put it on screen.
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Understood. Well, at least it turned out better than The Quiet American (1958).
Strange Days is such a perfect slice of the 90s and even beyond enjoying the plot and the sound and the filming choices, everyone in that film is so unutterably pretty.
I can't argue with that. I tend to remember Angela Bassett most vividly, but until The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) it was far and away the movie in which I best liked Ralph Fiennes. (And Juliette Lewis' PJ Harvey!)
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That's a great way of putting it and I don't even disagree. (I think I have a relatively high tolerance for almost useless characters, but it's not infinite.) His performance is one of the reasons the script doesn't end up accidentally replicating some of the racism/misogyny it is working to dynamite, which is always a danger when an awesome black character is emotionally invested in a much less awesome white character and goes double when the one is female and the other male. You never feel that Mace cares for him because it's the narratively unquestioned thing to do. He has to earn it—he's her romantic reward, not the other way around, but he's nothing like a worthy partner until he does two major pieces of growing up, one of which is personal and the other of which is political because this is a personal-is-political film—and you know she'd walk away if he didn't. "I care a lot about you, Lenny, a lot more than you know. Which makes us both pretty stupid."
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The thing that wins my sympathy for Lenny, I think, is the moments where we see him being competent. Yeah, okay, it's the villain driving him through the exegesis of his own crime, but "Come on, Lenny, you used to be good at this shit" -- I will put up with a lot more from a character who has an actual brain and skill and has just chosen to stop using them for a while than one who just kind of slimes his way through the plot on luck.
(And the moment when he hears someone in his apartment -- grabs his gun -- realizes it isn't loaded; swears silently -- goes back for the ammo -- it's not him being competent, except insofar as not leaving your firearms loaded is competence, but it's a great little character moment.)
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That's the growing up I was thinking of. He gives her the tape rather than using it for selfish bargaining purposes. He wouldn't have had even the fingers-crossed chance of that joyously apocalyptic millennium kiss if he hadn't figured out that his personal romantic angst does not trump the needs of black America to learn what happened to one of its heroes.
I agree that it's essential that Mace delivers the tape. Especially since Lenny could have walked into that restroom full of older white men without raising an eyebrow and Mace walks right in anyway. There's also the thing where Strange Days is an American movie that's unambiguously on the side of a black woman with a gun. I have trouble coming up with a comparable character to Mace without going back to blaxploitation or skipping ahead a decade or so. In the film noir on which Strange Days perfectly riffs—with sociopolitical concerns intact, not just style—she would have been the best friend, male, white, platonic, essentially Max if he hadn't been a nihilistic wirehead murderer. But she's not and it makes a difference to the film. It makes a difference that she gets what she wants, justice and love.
I will put up with a lot more from a character who has an actual brain and skill and has just chosen to stop using them for a while than one who just kind of slimes his way through the plot on luck.
Makes sense to me. That's the engine of Small Town Crime (2017), speaking of things riffing perfectly on noir.
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Cherenkov radiation through the steam of the overheated, leaking pipes suffuses the normally sealed area with luminous, uncanny blue—Doctor Manhattan blue, Shiva's throat blue, blue as the ionized air glow Louis Slotin saw at Los Alamos in 1946 when the screwdriver slipped and he tasted hard radiation and the demon core that had killed Harry Daghlian killed him, too, though it took him nine days to die. --That's beautiful and nightmare inspiring. You don't grow up during the Cold War without a special terror attached to radiation. What a beautiful, awful, killing demon.
I also completely understand your mixed feelings about the fictionalizing of characters within a framework of real history. That's complicated all right.
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Yes. I don't know a better way than to say they should not have had to do this thing and they did.
--That's beautiful and nightmare inspiring. You don't grow up during the Cold War without a special terror attached to radiation. What a beautiful, awful, killing demon.
That's how I end up writing things like "The Trinitite Golem." I can't remember not knowing something of the physics. Certainly the physical effects. And I was born in the last decade of the Cold War—I didn't even have to live through the Cuban Missile Crisis. I truly don't enjoy moving in that direction again.
I also completely understand your mixed feelings about the fictionalizing of characters within a framework of real history. That's complicated all right.
I am glad that the movie seems to have performed its intended service of introducing any number of American viewers to the story of K-19, because, like the story of Stanislav Petrov, it's worth knowing. But, yeah. I still feel complicated.