Kursk: The Last Mission

Cast: Matthias Schoenaerts, Lea Seydoux, and Colin Firth

Director: Thomas Vinterberg

117 minutes (12) 2018

Signature Blu-ray region B

Rating: 8/10

Review by Donald Morefield  

A European production in English, directed by Danish film-maker Thomas Vinterberg, this is a disaster movie based upon a true story about Russian submarine tragedy in August 2000. Kursk: The Last Mission (aka: The Command) starts with a wedding sequence in a smaller home-video styled frame-ratio, that only expands to a widescreen format after 17 minutes, when the sub departs from port. It embarks on a Northern Fleet exercise, monitored closely and with great concern by Royal Navy officers, in a British intelligence department led by Commodore Russell (Colin Firth, The King’s Speech, and Kingsman spoof movies), who is duly alarmed when the nuclear-powered vessel sinks in the Barents Sea.

With a name that sounds like ‘cursed’, perhaps the Russian ‘Kursk’ was always a doomed boat. A faulty and over-heated torpedo aboard for test-firing explodes, and the damaged sub drops onto the seabed. The secondary detonations of several warheads destroys the boat’s forward section. Among the surviving mariners, Mikhail (Matthias Schoenaerts, spy drama Red Sparrow), struggles to maintain discipline in a panicky crew, awaiting rescue. Back at home, his pregnant wife Tanya (French star Lea Seydoux, best known for Bond blockbuster Spectre), demands answers from shamefully secretive Russian officials, in a grim tale of technical negligence, prejudiced stupidity, and melancholic failure.

In our current international era of bureaucratic suspicion and territorial military paranoia, Kursk delivers an ethical and heartfelt message that compassionate behaviour nowadays is usually an act of extraordinary bravery. Despite a few differences from the actual millennial events, and a focus on emotive suffering rather than the simply practical considerations of political cooperation and military opposition, this picture offers a sterling drama of humanity under extreme conditions where loss of life might have been avoided. 

Pride and patriotic fervour always count for nothing when there’s not a shred of dignity or honour in meaningless death. Seeing those children, now fatherless, refusing to shake hands with obstinate Russian admiral Petrenko (a formidable presence, 90-year-old Max von Sydow here brings heavyweight credentials), delivers an instantly engaging and moving tribute with the effective power of painfully silent resentment in social protest.

Project X

Cast: Christopher George, Greta Baldwin, and Monte Markham

Director: William Castle  

97 minutes (12) 1968

101 Films Blu-ray region B

Rating: 6/10

Review by Steven Hampton

Based on two novels, The Artificial Man (1865), and Psychogeist (1966), by British author L.P. Davies, low-budget sci-fi thriller Project X concerns the fate of American spy Hagen Arnold (Christopher George). Frozen over a century ago, Hagen is revived from cryogenic sleep because he might know top-secret answers to new threats against the systemically idealised, but certainly not utopian, year 2118, a shiny era that seems rather more like a glum variation of Brave New World than anything visionary, released at the same time as Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“The west will be destroyed in 14 days!”

Because Hagen suffered amnesia on his last mission, 21st century authorities re-create a 1960s farmstead in their efforts to fool ‘Alan’ (alias, Hagen) into believing he has awoken 150 years in their past. They scheme to frame him for a crime and brutally control all of his behaviour and thoughts, whether he’s unconscious or in a nervous but waking state. Identity crisis is a common sci-fi movie trope and it’s often - as is the case here - coupled with hi-tech gimmicks that result in a mind-bending influence. Tricked into believing that he’s just a crook in a hideout after a robbery, Alan undergoes mind-controlling delusions in holograms that somehow unleash a repressed monster from the Id. Hagen’s troubled mind strikes with uncanny psychic energies prone to weird manifestation and terrifyingly defensive violence.

Gallea (Monte Markham, best known for bionic TV episode The Seven Million Dollar Man) provides a fly-in-the-ointment sub-plot as a deadly terrorist, who is apparently the victim of a Manchurian Candidate-styled subterfuge to release a lethal plague. Character-actor Keye Luke plays the impeccably inscrutable face of Sino-Asian menace. Although widely acknowledged as the king of cinema gimmicks, William Castle directs this drama clumsily but not without some special appeal for aficionados of novelty effects. There are several animated sequences to imbue this spy-fi with psychedelic visuals that, clearly, must have saved the production a fortune on large-scale special effects work designed to show us a convincingly designed techno-futurism.

A disembodied brain in a laboratory tank is scanned to recover its 'lost' secret knowledge, and yet, even after the advent of computers, nobody here appears to envision a virtual reality scenario emerging from this development. A happy-ending of sorts, although it will seem almost campy and quasi-satirical now), is devised by amoral science, and tacked on to alleviate any story-telling anxieties that might remain. Project X is quiet profoundly guilty of doing ‘science fiction’ like without due care and attention to necessarily important details - such as logic and extrapolation. Castle’s curio is an oddity, with genre aspects explored to better effect, and greater merits, in other more valued movies.