Barents Sea, August 12th, 2000. During a Russian naval exercise, and after suffering a serious accident, the K-141 Kursk submarine sinks with 118 crew members on board. While the few sailors who are still alive barely manage to survive, their families push for accurate information and a British officer struggles to obtain from the Russian government a permit to attempt a rescue before it is late. But general incompetence are against all their efforts.
Presumably, lessons were learned in the aftermath of this disaster. But the fact that the filming of ‘Kursk’ was delayed after the Russian Ministry of Defence failed to provide a permit on time, with suggestions that they grew concerned over giving the crew access to classified locations and information, does make you wonder.
- Jake Watt
Read Jake's full article...
https://www.maketheswitch.com.au/article/review-kursk-when-tragedy-and-bureaucracy-collide
Head to https://www.maketheswitch.com.au/sff for more Sydney Film Festival reviews.
As with many a tale like this - we will probably never know the whole story of how the Russian submarine "Kursk" came to sink and of the desperate attempts to rescue the stranded sailors. What Thomas Vinterberg does here, though, is direct a film with a plausible, quite compelling, narrative that elicits good, solid, performances from Matthias Schoenaerts and August Diehl who manage to convey the claustrophobic scenes on board remarkably well. Max von Sydow exemplifies the old guard establishment figure to a T and lends all the more to the frustration that maybe more could have been done to save lives had politicking played a less prominent role in the salvage process. Any comments on the accuracy of the efforts at international collaboration would be speculative, but Colin Firth does imbue some genuine sense of eagerness to assist and an awareness of the urgencies involved. This is well worth a watch.