Movie  2002
 K-19: The Widowmaker      Back      Home
Capt. Mikhail Polenin: It's never difficult to do one's duty, Captain.
Captain Alexei Vostrikov: How are the men?
Dr. Savran: How would I know? I don't know the first thing about radiation sickness.
Captain Alexei Vostrikov: Please....
Dr. Savran: I'm giving them aspirin. And I'm trying to prevent those who are dying from irradiating those of us who still have some hope.
Captain Alexei Vostrikov: Pull yourself together. You're an officer in the Soviet Navy. Go back and tell them that they're improving. As you say, you know nothing about radiation sickness. Perhaps they are.
Vadim Radtchenko: Hiroshima. 1.4 megatons.
Captain Alexei Vostrikov: We will not fail.
Captain Alexei Vostrikov: We deliver, or we drown.
Capt. Mikhail Polenin: They'll send you to the Gulag, like your father.
Captain Alexei Vostrikov: Well, it's a family tradition, isn't it?
Capt. Mikhail Polenin: They might as well wear raincoats.
Captain Alexei Vostrikov: How bad is it?
Vadim Radtchenko: The leak is in the sealed area. There's no way to get to it. The temperature will keep rising 'til it reaches 1,000 degrees, and...
Captain Alexei Vostrikov: And? And WHAT?
Vadim Radtchenko: No one knows.
Amazon.com
Based on an incident that was officially suppressed for 28 years, K-19: The Widowmaker is a fine addition to the "sub-genre" of submarine thrillers. The first major American film about Russian cold war heroes, it re-creates the nightmare endured in 1961 by the crew of the Soviet nuclear submarine K-19, when an exposed reactor core nearly resulted in a nuclear catastrophe. Several crewmen died, and K-19's captain (played by Harrison Ford) had to assert his command when near-mutiny favored his executive officer (Liam Neeson). This escalating tension gives the film its potent dramatic thrust, and both Ford and Neeson deliver intense performances while director Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark, Strange Days) ably controls a sub full of seething testosterone. It's not as viscerally thrilling as the classic Das Boot or U-571, and some K-19 survivors protested the inclusion of inauthentic drinking scenes, but the movie benefits from grand-scale production values, seamless computer graphics, and a compelling real-life twist. --Jeff Shannon