Skip to main content

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. 

     
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...
Post a Comment
Read more

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...
Post a Comment
Read more

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...
Post a Comment
Read more