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Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #263: Das Boot

Submarine movies are practically their own genre and Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (1981) is without a doubt one of the best movies in this genre. As the story unfolds you feel the claustrophobia of the crew as they are tossed inside a giant can of sardine that is sinking deeper and deeper into the ocean, and you can practically smell the salt water leaking inside the boat. You also root for this crew despite the fact they are Germans manning a U-boat in World War II and are therefore working for the bad guys.

Petersen has supervised different versions of Das Boot and the one I saw was the 209-minute director’s cut. It definitely requires the viewer to take an afternoon and a whole bag of popcorn to see it in one sitting, but a longer version is definitely beneficial to truly be immersed in the experience. By going on a long journey with these characters you get to know them before they get inside their submarine, empathize with them when things start going wrong and hope some of them will make it out alive. It also makes you really appreciate being able to go outside and take a walk in the sunlight.

As mentioned the crewmembers of this submarine are working for the Nazis, but that does not mean they all huge supporters of their country’s ideology. In a way they are like blue-collar workers taking orders from a boss high above the food chain, and sometimes they are vocal about how they disagree with the boss’s decisions. For one thing their Captain (Jürgen Prochnow) is a 30-year war veteran who has must have seen his fair share of bad leaders and is openly anti-Nazi. During a wild party in the opening act a drunken captain goes even further by mocking not only Winston Churchill, which makes sense given he was their enemy, but also Adolf Hitler himself.

These opening scenes are witnessed by Ensign Werner (Herbert Grönemeyer) a naïve war correspondent who is joining the crew to gather photographs of them in action. Werner acts as a surrogate for the viewers who most likely have never set foot in a submarine. Instead of action, Werner initially sees a lot of inaction since sometimes there can be a great deal of boredom and tediousness between battles. Once the action does begin the young sailors are eager for battle, but their enthusiasm begins to damper once things begin to go very wrong.

When enemy ships spot their submarine and start throwing depth charges the crew has to of course dive to avoid them. This gives us the classic submarine scene when you see that depth needle going down and you hear the walls start to creak as the outside pressure is building. These sailors are trained for these situations, but that doesn’t mean one of them is not going to have a panic attack. Even when the crew is successful and sinks an enemy ship the feeling is bittersweet. As they survey the wreckage they see British sailors escaping the flaming ship and swimming towards the submarine in hope of salvation, but the captain cannot accommodate them because he simply has no room for prisoners. Leaving his enemies to die in the ocean gives him no joy.

One of my favourite parts of the movie is when some of the crew members get some much-needed respite aboard a German merchant ship in Spain. After months spent inside the submarine they are not exactly dressed for a party, yet their hosts aboard the ship are well-dressed officers who have prepared a banquet and are awaiting tales of their exploits at sea. The contrast is both striking and sad. While the officers have been living in relative luxury above the ocean the crew of the U-boat have been risking their lives and at times sanity below the ocean in an tight space that by now is stinking of fuel, oil and most likely human waste. Even worse, the German consulate refuses their request for some men to be sent home, and now they must embark on a dangerous mission in the heavily defended Strait of Gibraltar.


We all know how this war ended, and it definitely ended they with the right side winning, but as a viewer I found myself rooting for the crew of Das Boot despite the fact they were fighting for the wrong side. Regardless of what flag they waved, they were just men trying to survive an ordeal and make it back home alive just like any other submarine crew. This is not just a great movie about a German U-boat; it is a great movie, period. 

     
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