It stars Matthias Schoenaerts, Léa Seydoux, Peter Simonischek, August Diehl, Max von Sydow, and Colin Firth.

At sea, weapons officer Pavel Sonin reports that the interior temperature of a HTP torpedo is increasing rapidly, indicating a potential hydrogen peroxide leak.

A secondary explosion of the remaining torpedoes rips a hole through the submarine's forward hull, sending the ship to the sea bed.

Admiral Grudzinsky, commander of the Northern Fleet, initially believes there are no survivors, but immediately tapping is heard through the hull of the submarine and the Russians deploy a rescue submersible.

The old and poorly maintained craft cannot form a seal on the Kursk's hull and is forced to return to the surface and wait for a 12-hour battery recharge.

Meanwhile the survivors begin to run low on air, requiring two crew members to swim into a flooded compartment to retrieve oxygen cartridges.

[14] Léa Seydoux joined the cast on 7 February 2017, in the role of Tanya, the wife of Mikhail Averin, a Russian Navy captain-lieutenant played by Matthias Schoenaerts.

[9] Deadline Hollywood also reported that Firth would play David Russell, a British naval commander going against Russia's warnings to try to save the men on the Kursk.

[15] According to The Hollywood Reporter,[15] EuropaCorp's president, Luc Besson, wanted to shift the story's focus to the rescue mission rather than the politics behind the disaster.

He was supposed to appear as a supporting character in at least five scenes and was sympathetically portrayed in the original Kursk script, which highlighted why he had taken the tragedy personally (Putin's father had been a submariner).

The website's consensus reads, "The Command plumbs the depths of real-life disaster to tell an uneven yet reasonably diverting story of lives caught between bureaucracy and certain doom.