Tonight on TV: This little-known thriller starring Jude Law is inspired by a terrible true story

Tonight on TV: This little-known thriller starring Jude Law is inspired by a terrible true story



Black Seaan underwater thriller that went unnoticed

Submarine movies are a genre of their own in cinema and a genre with some notable titles such as Hunting for Red October, Das Boot, USS Alabama or the French film The song of the wolf. In itself the setting of these films is already a cinematic adventure. Playing with the constraints of a very small space, the intensity of the dramatic issues and the relationships between the characters is mechanically multiplied tenfold. It is above all this device that pushed Kevin Macdonald, Oscar-winning director in 2000, for his documentary film One day in September and acclaimed for The last king of Scotlandto stage Black Sea in 2014.

Black Sea
Black Sea ©Universal Pictures

Submarine captain Robinson (Jude Law) assembles a half-British, half-Russian crew to find a Nazi submarine filled with gold… The discovery of the treasure will have consequences for all the men involved in this mission. How many of them will emerge alive?

A film with political resonance and inspired by a terrible drama

The story of Black Sea and these submariners tearing each other to pieces is a fiction, but it’s set in a realistic setting, with a political backdrop. It is in fact found in the waters of a Black Sea disturbed by the events of the 2008 Russo-Georgian War that its plot unfolds. To fuel the realism and political echoes of his film, Kevin Macdonald then assembles an English-speaking and a Russian-speaking cast, counting on their foreignness to make him feel better on screen. the tension between the characters. At the forefront of the English-speaking cast, Jude Law but also Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn offer surprising performances.

In addition to the technical challenge of filming a thriller set in a submarine, Kevin Macdonald also found inspiration in this a very real eventa real tragedy that occurred in 2000: the sinking of the Russian submarine K-141 Kursk. On August 12, 2000, during a torpedo training exercise in the Barents Sea, two explosions occurred that sank the ship. Of the 118 crew members, 23 survived these explosions. Isolated in an emergency airlock, they died of asphyxiation in the following days, the last attempts to savage them having failed.

Kevin Macdonald explained to Time in January 2015:

“Black Sea” is inspired by an incident that occurred in 2000 in Russia. The Kursk was a submarine that suffered an explosion, sank, and ran aground on the ocean floor. Inside were 23 sailors still alive. They were just 100 meters from the surface and pounding on the side of the vessel to send signals to the people above. But they were never able to save them and they all died when the air ran out. “What a horrible, scary scenario,” I said to myself, and that’s where the idea for the film was born.

Source: Cine Serie

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