It might have been to The Command‘s detriment that I watched it very soon after Chernobyl. Apparently this is the summer for Soviet disaster movies.
Both films cover actual nuclear disasters that happened because of the culture of the time: the overriding imperative to be first/best, damn the human cost, along with paranoia and arrogance on the part of senior leadership. And both works end in tragedy, with the feeling that nothing has been learned. Both films also use English-speaking actors with varying accents. But whereas Chernobyl did an outstanding job of walking us through the perfect storm of factors leading to the reactor explosion, The Command falls flat.
To be fair, Chernobyl is a miniseries that can take its time. The Command must pack all of its storytelling into 117 minutes. Its physical environment is compressed as well, literally limiting what we can see. Still, the combination of a compelling story, along with an excellent director (Thomas Vinterberg, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Hunt) and writer (Robert Rodat, Saving Private Ryan, The Patriot; working from Robert Moore’s book A Time to Die), should have produced something that draws more of an emotional reaction.
To recap the history, the Kursk was a nuclear-powered sub, launched in 1994, that Russia inherited after the fall of the Soviet Union. In August 2000, it was participating in a massive naval exercise in the Barents Sea when a faulty weld on the casing of a dummy torpedo led to a small explosion, killing some crew immediately and sinking the sub. That explosion in turn caused the detonation of up to seven other torpedo warheads 2 minutes later. The second event registered 4.2 on the Richter scale as far away as Alaska. Incredibly, 23 sailors managed to survive both explosions, taking refuge in the aft compartment of the sub. But the Russian Navy didn’t know that the Kursk had sunk at all, and didn’t begin a search for more than 6 hours. It took them more than 16 hours just to find the boat, and 4 more days of ineffective attempts to access the sub’s escape hatch, before they allowed British and Norwegian sailors to help. By then, the initial survivors had long since died. In the meantime, the families of the victims were stonewalled, lied to, and, in one case, forcibly sedated to avoid difficult questions to the Putin government.
The film does a good job portraying the daily lives of the sailors and their families before the accident. And Alexandre Desplat’s score is minimal and effective. In one scene, a protracted period of total silence helps create some much-needed tension, as two of the sailors must hold their breath to retrieve replacement oxygen cartridges from a flooded compartment. But the cinematography is muddy overall, and the foreshadowing is of the “hit them with an anvil” variety. Mainly, both the actors and the audience are just waiting for the sailors to die.
Perhaps if the film had included some of the resulting investigation, or worldwide press at the time, we would have gotten more of an emotional payoff. Instead, the movie chooses to close with a simple card saying that the disaster “left behind 71 children.” I guess the grieving wives, girlfriends, parents, and friends weren’t sufficient to tug on the heartstrings.
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The Command Rated PG-13 117 min
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg
Written by Robert Rodat (screenplay), Robert Moore (book, A Time to Die)
Featuring Matthias Schoenaerts, Léa Seydoux, Peter Simonischek, Colin Firth, and Max von Sydow