![]() ![]() It sanitizes or seems to absolve some of the chain of command, and utterly ignores the PR disaster that new-“president” Vladimir Putin presided over. “The Command” plays down the whopper that the Russians insisted on repeating, time and again, that a NATO (American) submarine had collided with theirs, causing the disaster. We get truthful if not precisely accurate accounts of a secretive military culture and government given to hiding everything from its people struggling to “contain” this crisis, stalling and harrumphing in bursts of Cold War paranoia.Īnd there is pathos, a crackling intercom conversation between the aft compartment and the nuclear reactor crew - “We can’t leave, or it’s Chernobyl!” A little boy asks his mother, “Is Dad dead?” ![]() The chronology is flawed as to who knew what and when, and who offered to help first, and the film is too eager to put fake names on characters, too eager to allow that fictionalization to move to the fore.īut there is dramatic underwater free-diving repair footage as Mikhail and his men struggle to buy themselves more time. Too much of what the world knows about the disaster has been filtered through an unreliable Russian investigation and cover-up, and some dramatic license is to be expected in a movie with European stars and financing, and the need to condense the “ticking clock” race to save the men in the stern of the huge boat. are way ahead of them, pretty much for the rest of the movie. The admiral and his men on the surface have to figure out what’s happened and process a response.īut over in Britain, Commodore Russell & Co. Mikhail, Oleg ( Magnus Millang) and a few others must scramble to stabilize their flooding compartment, get a pump running and tap on the hull to get the fleet’s attention. Only men in an aft compartment survive the blast and flooding. Russell doesn’t hear that concern brushed off, and the crew members muttering “Say your prayers” to each other, nor does he hear the “I am not a religious…” before the inevitable happens.īut Russell and his team hear the “BOOM” when the five ton “dummy” weapon blows up, the crunch when the sub plunges to the bottom and the even more massive explosion that follows minutes later. Commodore Russell doesn’t hear the torpedoman’s warning call to the captain, that the no-warhead “practice” torpedo they’re set to use is leaking its igniter chemical into its fuel. “Now all we have to do is figure out who our enemies are.” In the movies, this is what the “good Russians” say.Īnd Colin Firth is the British commodore in charge of monitoring this exercise from afar, via observer subs and deep sea listening devices. He grouses about the state of the ships, and the size of deployment, even if a subordinate boasts they are “ more than enough to send a message to our enemies. Mikhail’s biggest concerns before putting to sea is gathering the booze for a shipmate/pal’s rowdy weepy Russian Orthodox wedding, which he secures from corrupt quartermasters.Īdmiral Grudzinskty ( Peter Simonischek) is the leader of the Northern Fleet, on the bridge of his flag ship for the first fleet exercises since the fall of the U.S.S.R. Matthias Schoenaerts is Mikhail, a petty officer aboard “Kursk” with an adoring son ( Artemiy Spiridonov) and a loving, very pregnant wife ( Léa Seydoux). It’s based on Robert Moore’s book on the disaster, “A Time to Die,” and follows three threads. The narrative is heavily fictionalized, with the screenwriter slapping the names of Russian skaters and dancers on some naval characters. “The Command” is a Western account of the 2000 disaster, a harrowing but routine thriller released as “Kursk” in Europe (now on DirectTV and in North American theaters June 21).įrench super-producer Luc Besson ensures that the cast and effects are first rate, and Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (“The Hunt,””The Celebration”) summons up as much suspense as he can for a tragedy in which most viewers will remember how it came out. Or so officialdom ( Max Von Sydow) thought. Official indifference put them there, the populace’s famous Russian fatalism would play right into that. “All in good time,” we hear one elderly admiral purr to concerned families of the submarine “Kursk.” Of course, by this time the massive submarine, pride of the Russian Navy, was sitting on the bottom of the Barents Sea, its nose blown off. Scrambling to get the Northern Fleet into a major military exercise didn’t take into account what the crews, and officers, hadn’t been drilled in - for years - to keep themselves and their vessels safe.Īnd then a hydrogen peroxide/kerosene-powered torpedo gets “angry,” and the rigid chain of command doesn’t respond well to emergencies. ![]() Maintenance had fallen by the board, and not just on ships mothballed because they couldn’t afford to send them to sea. Sailors were bartering to pay for necessities, including the booze for a shipmates’ wedding, because Mother Russia wasn’t meeting payroll. ![]()
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