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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