Robinson is a strong leader, but only if you define strength as a mix of scary intensity and a knack for pushing other people's buttons. His sailors are basically an assortment of giant, walking buttons, and as Robison hammers on them, they hammer on each other. The Russians (Grigory Dobrygin, Konstantin Khabensky, Sergey Seksler, Sergey Klesnikov, Sergey Puskepalis) are all stereotypically grim, taciturn Slavic types, many of whom have been outfitted with Perfect Storms of facial hair; the way MacDonald frames and lights them, etching their faces in desiccated shades of red, ochre and sea-foam green, they could be unnamed figures on the covers of 18th century fiction anthologies (Joseph Conrad, probably). The English are more talkative, demonstrative and needy. Like the Russians, they're all variations on familiar adventure-movie types, including the casually murderous psycho (Ben Mendelsohn's Fraser) and the teenaged newbie (Bobby Schofield's Tobin) whose innocence strikes fatherly chords in our otherwise cynical skipper. There's also a company man named Daniels (Scoot McNairy), who's so much like the glad-handing sleazeball yuppie Burke from James Cameron's "Aliens" that you're not surprised when he replicates some of Burke's more treacherous maneuvers, gesture-for-gesture.
"Black Sea" looks so gorgeous and moves with such muscular grace that you might forget, or never imagine, that it's a relatively small action movie. It was shot with digital cameras the size of napkin dispensers, mainly inside a 1967-vintage Soviet "Hunter-Killer" sub owned by a private collector in the Medway River in the town of Rochester, in Kent. Once the characters batten down the hatches, about 90% of the story occurs within the confines of the submarine, with occasional cutaways that show a miniature version of the vessel diving, surfacing, taking on water, or navigating obstacles. MacDonald and his crew seem not only to have studied the classics of the submarine genre (notably "Das Boot," "Run Silent, Run Deep" and "Crimson Tide") but to have borrowed specific camera moves and shots (including tilted angles that convey emotional as well as spatial imbalance).
There are moments when the script leans too heavily on "because I said so" storytelling, pushing the plot to wherever it needs to go without coming up with a way to make it seem as though it's getting there organically. (The psycho Fraser is particularly irritating in this regard; he's at the center of so many sudden, horrendous crises that it makes you think less of Robinson for being reckless enough to hire him.)
Nevertheless, "Black Sea" holds together, thanks mainly to its airtight rhetorical scheme (the crew members truly are little guys trying to grab a piece of the economic pie that's normally hoarded by one-percenters) and its keen sense of what's actually required to carry out this kind of mission, in terms of materials, training and temperament. Because the script does such a good job of explaining what needs to happen in order for the mission to succeed, your heart starts to race when things don't go as planned. These guys are, in every sense of the phrase, in over their heads, and under ungodly pressure. No wonder they start to crack.
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