Kursk: The Last Mission

As the open­ing cred­its – white on a blank black back­ground – roll, we hear watery sounds and a gasp­ing inhala­tion. Young Misha (Artemiy Spiri­donov) appears in medi­um close-up, com­plete­ly under­wa­ter, and the arm of Mikhail Averin (Matthias Schoe­naerts) moves in front of his face so that the lit­tle boy can time how long he holds his breath by his father’s naval watch. In fact Misha is mere­ly in a small domes­tic bath­tub, but his strug­gle for air amid sur­round­ing water fore­shad­ows what is to come, as does that watch, mark­ing the time run­ning out before a breath must once again be taken.

The cap­tain-lieu­tenant of a Russ­ian sub­ma­rine, Mikhail will not keep his watch for long. For he and his fel­low crew mem­bers, still wait­ing for their ser­vice pay, have to trade in their watch­es in order to pur­chase the booze for the wed­ding par­ty of their friend Pavel (Matthias Schweighöfer). Time has run out for all of these men, and the full sig­nif­i­cance of this becomes clear when we realise that the ves­sel they are about to board for a naval exer­cise in the Bar­ents Sea is the Kursk, which, dur­ing manoeu­vres in 2000, sank to the sea floor after an onboard explo­sion caused by a faulty torpedo.

Sev­er­al men sur­vived the ini­tial and sub­se­quent blasts, and strug­gled to stay alive in a com­part­ment with waters ris­ing and air run­ning out, even as res­cue efforts were frus­trat­ed by the Rus­sians’ ill-main­tained equip­ment, Cold War men­tal­i­ty and refusal to accept for­eign assistance.

Adapt­ed by Robert Rodat from Robert Moore’s foren­sic non-fic­tion account of the dis­as­ter ​‘A Time To Die’, Thomas Vinterberg’s Kursk: The Last Mis­sion presents a sequence of real events that are in the pub­lic domain, if not nec­es­sar­i­ly famil­iar to every­body. And so it plays a dou­ble game, keep­ing some view­ers on ten­ter­hooks with the ten­sion of not know­ing what will hap­pen next, while ham­mer­ing oth­ers with the dra­mat­ic irony that their fore­knowl­edge of events brings.

The cam­er­aderie of the men, estab­lished ear­ly on by their will­ing­ness to sac­ri­fice their own watch­es for a friend, is what will bind them in the face of their increas­ing­ly des­per­ate cir­cum­stances, as they con­tin­ue to work togeth­er, tell sto­ries, sing songs, take col­lec­tive risks and write what might be their last good­byes to their loved ones. All these human­is­ing inter­ac­tions are accept­able fic­tive extrap­o­la­tions, for there is no way of know­ing in any detail what went on inside the strick­en Kursk. The prob­lem is that they are also clichés – and as Matthias repeat­ed­ly steals glances at fam­i­ly pho­tos, any­one who has seen a dis­as­ter movie before will have a pret­ty good idea, even with­out recourse to the his­tor­i­cal record, that he is doomed.

In Xavier Dolan’s Mom­my, there’s an extra­or­di­nary moment when, just as the protagonist’s oth­er­wise con­strained hori­zons sud­den­ly broad­en, the film’s Acad­e­my ratio stretch­es to widescreen. A sim­i­lar trick is pulled in Kursk, but to far less com­pelling effect. It begins with its land­locked scenes pre­sent­ed in an aspect ratio of 1.66:1 but opens out to 2.35:1 once the sub has dived.

What at first seems a bold­ly para­dox­i­cal deci­sion – to go wide only as the film’s set­ting become more claus­tro­pho­bic – is under­mined when the widescreen is main­tained for scenes above the sur­face: Tanya and the oth­er wives con­fronting the author­i­ties (includ­ing Max von Sydow’s patro­n­is­ing­ly deceit­ful Admi­ral Petrenko); British Com­modore David Rus­sell (Col­in Firth) try­ing to con­vince the Rus­sians to let him help. A return to the nar­row­er frame in the film’s final scenes comes with no more obvi­ous rhyme or rea­son. The cin­e­mato­graph­ic gram­mar is ill-con­ceived, a point­less and dis­tract­ing gim­mick that fails in any way to assist the drama.

Kursk is both a wait­ing game and a race against the clock. Even before they go on their ill-fat­ed voy­age, these men are wait­ing – for long-delayed pay, for the arrival of new­borns – and once they are trapped on the ocean bed, they must wait some more, as time rapid­ly gets away from them. In their con­fined and hos­tile envi­ron­ment, as in Gray Lady Down, Das Boot, K‑19: The Wid­ow­mak­er, all their hopes and fears, all their sad dreams and futile efforts, take on an exis­ten­tial com­plex­ion, offer­ing a high­ly pres­surised encap­su­la­tion of the human con­di­tion. All this is both grip­ping and har­row­ing. The film’s oth­er focus – on Russ­ian polit­i­cal arro­gance and cov­er-up – nev­er gets much beyond sur­face level.