Kursk

The sailor characters could have been further developed other than through clichéd family ties to their wives and children, but the admirals on the surface richly compensate for that with their varied motivations and political backgrounds. Colin Firth is as well suited to the captain character as Tom Hanks. Not to mention the communist Soviet admiral played by Max von Sidow, who turns in a goosebump-inducing performance. The casting in general is very well done here; I hadn’t realised until now how much Schoenaerts and Seydoux have “Russian faces”. But what I appreciate most about Kursk is its thematic balance and complexity. To the same extent that Kursk is about the tragedy of men under water, it is also about the political conflict above the surface and the absurdity of the Soviets’ approach to the event. It’s about a rotten system that betrayed its own people because of false ideas. The second Chernobyl in 14 years. The film gains its key value from the skirting of the story through a young boy, the son of one of the submariners, and his understanding of the situation and his reaction to it. (07/01/2021)

I would like to draw your attention to Marigold's submarine dogma in advance: submarine = automatically * plus. Because according to all other criteria, Thomas Vinterberg shot only a slightly above-average genre template. A celebration of boyish friendship spiced with sentiment and two-dimensional characters. He tries to draw something more from the jerky screenplay by Robert Rodat (among others, Saving Private Ryan) through format changes, veristic filming and emphasis on wordless details (a boy as a silent witness and conscience). But there is simply nothing more in this film. The real case is devastating and could do without the extra drama. The film works because some of the sequences are catchy (underwater search for oxygen cartridges in one suffocating shot) and Schoenaerts does a decent job in the lead role, as does Firth in the supporting role. As a Kursk Memorial it is dignified, but above the surface the film does not release the conflict between the Hollywood template and the attempt to conceive it as a civil statement about the tragedy of ordinary people. The performances of broken mothers then inadvertently resemble bad theater. It's a shame, but the years in development hell didn't help. (15/01/2019)

I'm not a big fan of submarines and the Navy, so I went into this film more out of curiosity and it wasn't bad. The explosion in Kursk is filmed decently and the following submarine survival drama is filmed entertainingly though it definitely could have been grittier as well as more gripping. I wasn't bored but I'm not the target audience. However, for fans of submarines and movies based on true events, I recommend it. 60%. (14/05/2019)

Better to vent on your own people than to allow acts of interference, or K-141: The Orphanmaker. It might seem that the combination of Vinterberg and a disaster film based on real events would be as compatible as copper with brass and hydrogen peroxide, but despite the post-production inferno, it wasn't so bad. I could envision a more honest procedural aspect, as well as a better profiling of the characters, but on the desperate shores that relativized the concept of national humiliation, it worked quite well in its intimacy. (18/02/2021)

We haven’t had this good of a submarine film since K-19. It's 100% impressive depressing drama... Especially when it gives the sailors and their families little hope that everything can turn out good after all. And you wish for it with them. However, probably every viewer knows how the events really played out, and that's why those scenes are so strong. Admittedly, I didn't expect much from The Command, but I ended up sitting in the movie theatre and not moving, filled with tension and feeling pretty miserable during the end credits. It is shot great (the directing and camera use the claustrophobic environment to the maximum and, for example, the quest for oxygen is unforgettable), Alexander Desplat's music did not disappoint and for me, the unknown actors - Colin Firth or Max von Sydow - give very believable performances. (19/01/2019)