K-19: The Widowmaker

Regular Feature | Film Reviews potential. But in this film Anakin is portrayed as a willful adolescent who chafes at the direction ofhis superiors. Is youthful willfulness, then, the source of evil? It is true that later in the film, Anakin slaughters a village of Sandpeople in avenging the death of his mother. This demonstrates that he cannot control his negative emotions—hatred, particularly. But the film also suggests that Anakin is undone by his love for Senator Amidala. The adolescent Anakin is thus portrayed as a rather incoherent lump of emotions, an apt depiction of adolescence, but a less-thansatisfying depiction of evil. Romeo kills Tybalt in a rage, but how does he go from there to become Richard III? This is the question to be addressed in Episode III, which Lucas has promised will be a "dark" film. Given the disappointing quality ofthe first two installments in the new trilogy, the prospect ofan interesting depiction ofthe fall ofthe Republic, and ofAnakin Skywalker, is bleak. A final thought on special effects. Lucas clearly thinks that people go see his films because of the special effects, and the effects in this film are quite spectacular. They are also, however, less than original. One often has the feeling that one has seen a particular effect before. Coruscant owes as much to Blade Runner and The Fifth Element as to Asimov, and parts of the final battle scene seem to come straight out of Starship Troopers. One of the creatures in the execution scene resembled the monsters in Stephen King's The Langoliers, and another seemed to be straight out of Clash ofthe Titans. In short, Clones suggests thatthe technological capacity to represent images may have outstripped the ability of fantasy to create new ones. Emery G. Lee III Case Western Reserve University K-19: The Widowmaker Though much of the advance publicity for K-19: The Widowmaker has centered on its two lead stars, Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson; for Kathryn Bigelow fans, this film represents a long-awaited follow-up to her late 1980s and early 1990s work. As one ofthe only women specializing in the contemporary action genre, Bigelow has been celebrated by film scholars for her auteurist vision on the one hand and has struggled to make blockbuster box office in a cutthroat marketplace on the other. Her 1991 Point Break was a smash success; however, Blue Steel (1990) and Strange Days (1995) met mixed reviews and medium returns, taking their place later as popular cult movies. K-19 follows on the heels of her long and lost battle with Luc Bresson over The Messenger: Joan of Arc and a buried release of the acclaimed The Weight of Water starring Sarah Polley and Sean Penn. This story of averted disaster aboard a Russian submarine in 1961, then, has the potential to revive Bigelow's directorial career or sink it into the depths of obscurity. K-19 is not the movie sold by Paramount's publicity, nor is it the film most of its target market, fourteen to thirty-four yearold males, expect from a Harrison Ford movie. Its faults are not easily dismissed, especially the lastthirty minutes ofthe screenplay which devolve into overstated explanation ofcharacter motivation and a lazy, heavy-handed sabotage of the rather adept exposition that Bigelow and screenwriter Christopher Kyle lay out delicately in the film's first two hours. Furthermore, K-19 is NOT a characterdriven movie and, because it lacks attention to internal conflict and anything more than cursory inter-personal drama, it therefore fails to "accomplish its mission," to invoke the redundant and stubborn language of Ford's Captain Alexei Vostrikov. However, the film needs to be appreciated as a theme-driven, statement film and, contrary to the opinion of many knee-jerk critics upon its opening weekend debut, it deserves to be commended for making a statement about the merits of Communism's original goals as well as the failures of capitalist democracy. The K-19 submarine represented the Soviet military hopes for successful competition with the U.S. nuclear build-up in the early 1960s. The Widowmaker sets out to tell the tale ofthe sub's one hundred and thirty-nine...