K-19: The Widowmaker dvd movie.|
K-19: The Widowmaker buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
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List Price: $9.98 Our Price: $9.98 Features • Anamorphic • Closed-captioned • Color • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 19 July, 2002 DVD Release : 10 December, 2002 |
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K-19: The Widowmaker description 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 |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Picks Up in the Second Half |
| "K19: The Widowmaker" is a somewhat slow-moving military film focusing on a Soviet sub during the Cold War. Its saving grace isn't the acting by Harrison Ford, who can't seem to keep a good aim at a Russian accent, but a nuclear accident and the sailors'reactions to it in the second half of the film. Although Ford basically puts in his expected days' work, Neeson and the other actors do a remarkable job, especially in the scenes in which they must risk their lives to attempt to repair the sub, and decide whether to accept an offer of help from a nearby US ship.
Much to the horror of American unions, Osetian superconductor Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky (formerly Kirov) orchestra provided the soundtrack for this film when they happened to be in Washington, D.C. at the Lincoln Center for some other performance. It was a big to-do. In the end, the film went to press with the Russians on the tape. (Gergiev has been quoted as saying all he knew were that the filmmakers told he and his musicians that everything was fine; he figured they'd work it out with the union. One assumes they did.) One further note: shortly after this film was released theatrically, I remember borrowing from the library a Soviet-made VHS about an *American* sub that got into the same sort of trouble that K-19 did, with the crew even balking at the help of a Russian vessel. It was exactly the same story, the other way round. I wish I could recall the name, but it was long before I started doing these reviews. I suppose a Soviet director in the sixties did not have the leisure of actually using the true story for such a film! |
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