HBO revisits the paranoia of the Cold War tonight at 9 with a tautly made, sort-of-partly-true film about an undersea face-off with nuclear warheads. It's a hell of a movie, but take it with a grain of S.A.L.T.
"Hostile Waters" is based on a very real, very sensational event: the 1986 fire aboard the missile-packed Soviet nuclear submarine K-219 off the U.S. East Coast. The fire killed three crewmen, injured eight others and eventually sank the sub, sending 32 warheads and a pair of nuclear reactors to a three-mile-deep grave in the Atlantic.
All the other crewmen aboard were safely rescued after heroic actions by the Soviet commander who was nonetheless dismissed from the Soviet Navy and barely avoided court-martial.
Unsatisfied with that much reality, however, producer Tony Garnett and writer Troy Kennedy Martin have hyped the story into a kind of "Hunt for Red October Meets Chernobyl," overlaid with the sort of government-as-boogeyman subtext we've come to expect from Hollywood.
"To this day the U.S. government denies this incident ever happened," reads an ominous legend at the start of the film. "The facts suggest otherwise."
You almost expect a guest appearance by Oliver Stone.
As entertainment, however, "Hostile Waters" is a prime-time winner: suspenseful and crafted with the care of two sub captains playing chicken of the sea.
If Rutger Hauer's Soviet commander sounds more Milwaukee than Moscow, Martin Sheen, as commander of the American hunter-killer, is a steely-eyed marvel, and Max von Sydow splendid as a wintry Soviet admiral thawing cynically in the winds of perestroika.
The shaky, Left Coast premise of "Hostile Waters" is that the fire on K-219 was triggered by a collision with an overzealous U.S. sub, and that subsequent maneuvers by the Soviet captain to save his ship and avert a nuclear disaster would be viewed by the U.S. government as a threat to throw-weight the entire East Coast.
However that plays in your particular understanding of government, it's artful television. No such confusion was possible in real life because the fire aboard the Soviet sub -- caused by leaking liquid missile fuel -- touched off such an explosion it blew part of the sub wide open to the sea. The vessel was obviously in extremis from the start.
Fortunately, the preachy pretensions of "Hostile Waters" are less convincing than its techno-thriller wizardry. Director David Drury is masterly in conveying the claustrophobic camaraderie of ships at sea, and his computer graphic imagery of the underwater world is touched with something very like wonder at all that's out there, far down beneath the waves. CAPTION: Rutger Hauer in HBO's "Hostile Waters."