![]() Compared to Chernobyl’s gruesome makeup effects, though - enough to spark nausea on their own - it seems tame, especially given that some of these men received at least twice the lethal dose of radiation. Its depiction of ARS - mostly vomiting, burns, and dizziness - probably seemed horrendous to audiences expecting a Harrison Ford submarine thriller. The effects of acute radiation sickness are, if anything, downplayed in K-19. The coda probably seemed the best way to do it, but it puts a weird victorious spin on lives that probably didn’t feel victorious at all. Everything just fizzled into Party-mandated silence. Bigelow clearly struggled with how to end her movie, given those circumstances. And like every other reactor failure up until Chernobyl, the accident was covered up. The crew lived out their lives, if they survived the accident. The submarine was towed back to base, repaired, and sent out for continued use, incredibly accumulating more accidents over the decades. There was no big climax no profound character turn no explosion (thankfully). That coda, however, wouldn’t exist were it not for the inconveniently anticlimactic course of the actual events. The scene is framed as a respectful recognition of the crew’s contributions, but the focus on Ford's character only further lifts him up as the film’s primary hero - a status that began with the casting itself. Perhaps most egregious is the film’s coda, wherein Ford’s character emotionally reunites with his crew, decades after the incident. The characters of K-19 and Chernobyl both make sacrifices, but only K-19 actively lionises them, the tragedy playing second fiddle to heroism. It’s entirely possible these actions took place in real life, but their presentation feels over the top. That, in turn, feeds into a hero moment for Ford’s character, who goes through the airlock without protection in order to extract his crewman. Even baby Peter Sarsgard, as K-19’s fresh-faced and cripplingly nervous reactor engineer, is given a hero moment as he finally overcomes his fear and enters the reactor room. Bigelow gets the job done, but there’s little unique style on display here.Ĭasting Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson as the submarine’s captain and executive officer, respectively, certainly helps glamourise the events, no matter how shaky their Russian accents. Klaus Badelt’s rousing score underlines the heroism of the men who worked to prevent disaster, where Hildur Guðnadóttir’s eerie Chernobyl score simply allows events to play out. The cinematography is robust, evenly-lit, and traditional, not far removed from any other action-thriller of the time, and despite filming in a real submarine, never quite feels as claustrophobic as, say, Das Boot. Several men died soon afterward more died prematurely later in life.īigelow’s film reshapes that story into a surprisingly traditional Hollywood story of heroism and sacrifice. The crew had to manually redirect coolant - a task that involved sloshing around in the reactor room's radioactive water and welding new pipes - while radiation from the supercritical reactor permeated the interior of the sub. A tamer accident than Chernobyl’s core explosion, then, but one exacerbated due to taking place inside a submarine. Taking place in a flagship nuclear submarine, the accident saw one of the boat’s two reactors lose coolant pressure, with reactivity and temperature rising dramatically. K-19 was different to Chernobyl in most ways, just as K-19 is different to Chernobyl in most ways. But in the wake of HBO’s Chernobyl, it’s worth revisiting, for it offers a vastly different take on a Soviet nuclear accident and the ensuing response. So disastrous was its release, Bigelow vanished from the scene for six years, only returning (and winning Oscars) with the decidedly lower-budget The Hurt Locker. With a budget of a hundred million dollars (the most expensive independent production ever, at the time), it died a miserable death at the box office. One of the few that has: that of the Soviet nuclear-powered submarine K-19, in the form of Kathryn Bigelow’s K-19: The Widowmaker.īarely anybody saw K-19 when it released in 2002. Those stories have barely been told in non-fiction print, let alone in dramatic cinema. Numerous failures, meltdowns, and explosions had befallen reactors around the USSR in the decades prior to Chernobyl - including, incredibly, one in a different reactor at Chernobyl. Chernobyl was the first nuclear accident the Soviet Union ever admitted occurred, but it was far from the first to actually take place.
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