Doomsday Machine

Unlike James Cameron or John Woo -- to name two of her peers in directing action -- Bigelow has never really been good at pleasing the mass audience. People complain that her work is cold, and that’s true. But she‘s also profoundly romantic, and this peculiar blend of the icy and the headlong can inspire unease, like watching two strangers making out passionately at the table next to you at a fancy restaurant: You watch, but you’re no part of it. Far from being a heartless hipster, Bigelow doesn‘t have an ironic bone in her body, and, watching K-19, I kept hoping for flashes of the delectable Russian sense of absurdity found in works such as Om On Ra (Viktor Pelevin’s sly novel about the Soviet space program) or My Friend Ivan Lapshin, Aleksei German‘s offbeat movie about an eccentric secret policeman in the Soviet provinces. No such luck. While what happens to Vostrikov and his crew is undeniably grim -- can you imagine being sent out in a nuclear sub without a single radiation suit? -- the story’s real interest should probably lie not in the situation but in the complicated ways that very different characters react to it. And this is what we never get.

Indeed, K-19 is so unnervingly square that it seems eerily like Party-sanctioned Soviet filmmaking: Its Motherland-loving sailors, myth-making shots of K-19 and displays of heroism are worthy of the Young Lenin Pioneers‘ Handbook. Although such cliches recall the aesthetic known as Socialist Realism, what’s obvious and bombastic in the movie is equally intrinsic to Hollywood movies like Saving Private Ryan and Pearl Harbor. Nearly everything annoying about the picture comes straight from the studio playbook, including a hectoring score complete with women‘s chorus. We might well dub its style Paramount Realism in honor of the studio that is releasing it. Bigelow has never made a film with so little going on beneath the surface, and I can just picture those meetings with the commissars from Paramount:

”Comrade Bigelow, your last few films have not pleased the people because you have confused them with your decadent ideas and bourgeois subtleties. Now, you must play the women’s chorus very loud -- the Chairman likes them very much -- and show many handsome photos of brave Soviet soldiers. You must deliver a timeless message of uplift. Should you fail . . . I‘m told the winters are very long at Oxygen.“

K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER | Produced and directed by KATHRYN BIGELOW | Written by LOUIS NOWRA and CHRISTOPHER KYLE | Released by Paramount | Citywide