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Preview by Jack Foley |
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FORMER Box Office Golden boy Harrison Ford has had something of a topsy turvy
run of late, flitting between flops such as Random Hearts and smashes such
as What Lies Beneath.
It seems the days of guaranteed money-spinners have long since passed for
the Indiana Jones star and his latest, K-19 The Widowmaker, has done little
to improve the star’s fortunes.
The true story of a Russian submarine crew’s 1961 battle to prevent a
nuclear meltdown in the Atlantic, which cost eight lives, K-19 was one of
the summer’s first box office casualties when it was released in America
earlier this year, while it has courted its fair share of controversy.
In truth, Kathryn (Point Break) Bigelow’s movie is a tense and exciting,
albeit overlong, submarine drama in the Das Boot/Crimson Tide tradition; but
it has re-opened the debate about Hollywood’s tendency to take artistic
liberty with historical fact.
After reading a draft script, veterans’ groups in Russia blasted the
film’s portrayal of the sub’s crew as ‘a bunch of alcoholics
and illiterates’, while seven crew members sent an open letter to this
week’s Venice Film Festival saying that they were saddened and surprise
by the decision to show it.
The letter states: "It is unthinkably painful to us that this film...
will be considered a reference upon which the new generation of film-goers
including our own children will form ideas about us and our comrades."
Worse still, a report in Russia’s Izvestia daily newspaper revealed that
some K-19 survivors have threatened to sue the filmmakers, claiming that the
movie is not so much a film about Russians, ‘but about how Americans
want to see Russians’.
And the submarine's former lieutenant-commander, Yury Mukhin, 71, accused
the film of making his crew look like pirates more than sailors, while also
taking objection to on-screen references to their Vodka-drinking habits and
their need to consult handbooks in an emergency.
"This was the Soviet Union's first nuclear submarine, and the crew consisted
of professionals of the highest quality, not layabouts," he said.
The letter, in particular, forced both Ford and Bigelow to defend the movie’s
content upon arrival at the annual Venice festival, while the producers have
assured veterans that all references to drunken incompetence have been removed.
Bigelow argued that the submarine epic was a chance to humanise former Cold
War enemies, while Ford - who has been criticised for his portrayal of the
sub’s captain as a ‘soulless militant’ who regularly clashed
with his second in command (Liam Neeson) - insisted that there had been efforts
to explain the aims of the film to veterans.
He said that the producers had met with many of the survivors during the making
of the film and that the movie ‘represented our intention to acknowledge
the sacrifice that those men made’.
Bigelow, too, maintained that not all the survivors have complained about
the script and claimed to have spent a lot of time between 1995 and 2000 meeting
with survivors while producing the script.
She is quoted as saying: "Many times in my meetings I would find myself
embraced by them with tear-stained faces saying you must tell our story."
She believes the movie should be applauded for finally taking the Russian
point of view, while she describes the most inspiring element of the picture
as its humanity which, she claims, is ‘able to cross all geopolitical
lines’.
Her comments were endorsed by Ford in Venice, who referred to ‘the international
language of film’ as emotion, adding: "Our common humanity is exercised
by seeing how people react to a situation that may be tragic."
As a further gesture of goodwill towards the survivors and families of those
who served on K-19, a one per cent share of the box office proceeds is to
be donated to them, according to Gevorg Nersesyan, director of the Russian
company distributing the film.
But given that K-19 has so far amassed only $34m (£22m) at the US Box
Office, placing it in 51st place among this year's releases (according to
the Box Office Report website), this may come as scant consolation.
The film drew a mixed response from US critics. See below for details. Alternatively,
click here for Indielondon's verdict...
What the US critics thought:
Entertainment
Weekly was among the most scathing, saying that the film ‘may not hold
a lot of water as a submarine epic, but it holds even less when it turns into
an elegaically soggy 'Saving Private Ryanovich’. They awarded it a C.
The Boston Pheonix, meanwhile, went one step further, declaring that it ‘sinks
under its turgid solemnity’.
But the Hollywood Reporter said that K-19 ‘earns the right to be favorably
compared to ‘Das Boot’, arguably the greatest of all submarine movies’,
while the New York Times referred to it as ‘a tense, swift drama of mechanical
catastrophe and dueling egos’.
FilmCritic.com said that it was ‘a satisfying summer blockbuster and
worth a look’, while the Chicago Tribune said that it is ‘absorbing
and honestly scary in a way movies like this rarely are’.
Of a more mixed nature were the likes of E! Online, which stated that it ‘keeps
itself above sea level. Barely’,
The New York Post, meanwhile, described it as ‘Cliché-ridden but
moving’, and awarded it two and a half out of four stars, while Variety
stated that it ‘obediently follows the verities of the submarine movie
and its true story origins but without the imagination needed to refresh the
genre’.
The final word in this critical overview, however, goes to LA Weekly, which
(flying in the face of the criticism levelled upon the film by the Russians),
felt that K-19 is ‘so unnervingly square, that it seems eerily like Party-sanctioned
Soviet filmmaking’.
The movie opens in UK cinemas on October 25.
GUIDE TO LINKS: Click on right hand link for the National Geographic
website on the K-19, or click on the left hand link button for the movie's
official website...
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