Why the fuck should you watch “Kursk”? • „Inspired by a real life disaster movies, where a ship sinks” is your favorite movie genre since Titanic. • You enjoy watching people struggling for their life, for justice and for humanity. • Fuck the government, right? Am I right? Well if I am, then this movie is a gasoline and you are a fire • You like to watch a movie that looks rather good, sounds rather good but feels rather underwhelming in the end.
In life there are small fails (like my last marriage), medium sized fails (like the box office results for “SOLO: A Star Wars Story”), mega fails (like the Fantastic 4 reboot (2015)) as well as avoidable fails (like the expensive and crap CGI to remove Superman’s moustache in the Justice League movie). Somehow the European submarine drama thriller Kursk manages to pull all of these off. As a historical condolence card for the ones who mourn their sailors that the legendary Russian nuclear-powered submarine took to the seabed in 2000, Kursk is a weird mix of Hollywood and European cinema. I mean, it is not really bad at anything, but it’s not spectacularly good at anything either.
But why? The screenplay is by the author of “Saving Private Ryan” and direction by Thomas Vinterberg, one of the founders of Dogma 95 while being the dude who enthralled and frustrated us with his masterpiece The Hunt. They tell a humane story about old school masculine and brotherly sailors, who go on a naval exercise, which ends up pretty badly due to shitty Russian technology, human errors or perhaps some other reason, that you can read in some conspiracy theory (go check Wikipedia). And then they tell about the women who stayed at the shore demanding information and justice about the situation that the government had put their husbands in. Aaaand this is not all. The movie also tells a little story about the politics and annoying bureaucratic actions that obstructed the “rescue operation” of these men.
Yes, indeed there is a lot of material for a movie: a historical catastrophe, rescue mission, struggle for survival under seas, family drama, war themes, the state vs. the individual, Russia vs. the West, Russia as a stubborn nation who prefer keeping war equipment secrets over their citizens’ lives, Western nations as helpful and good players in the geopolitical field, etc. But none of these themes are explored in depth. Instead there are some tear jerkingly melodramatic dialogues and monologues, which are performed by European actors, who speak English with a little Russian accent (yes, it is as distracting as Americans doing this). If we leave out a few scenes from the submarine survival story line that are quite impressively choreographed, the movie feels a little passionless. Although the film makes you feel sorry for the people who faced such unjust and unnecessary faith, it doesn’t do much more. You just see the submarine sinking, but your feelings stay in the surface, whereas your mind is thinking WTF I’m doing here.
Why the fuck you shouldn’t watch “Kursk”? • Hardcore The Beatles fans may find it hard to concentrate on the movie without starting humming: We all live in a yellow submarine. Yellow submarine, yellow submarine. We all live in a yellow submarine. Yellow submarine, yellow submarine. • Melodrama with a hint of catastrophe drama and submarine thriller, please? Try to pick the fucking tone. • If you want to know when watching Kursk “I wonder do the aliens win…” wrong movie, man. • Why Putin was cut off the movie, dude? The newly elected Putin who was doing things without his shirt on a vacation during the events cannot be found in this movie.
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