DAS BOOT (DIRECTOR'S CUT)
A film review by Ben Hoffman
Copyright 1997 Ben Hoffman
This review is about the new (1997) Director's Cut but will of necessity be mostly about the original film which we saw in 1982.
Originally, the 1982 film was shown on German TV in a six-hour mini-series. It was then released in about a 2-hour version and arrived in the United States . . . but not without a lot of trepidation on the part of director and producers. Here was a film with German subtitles. Subtitles take a beating with the U.S. public. Even more worrisome the film was about German submariners, the enemy that torpedoed many an Allied ship and convoy. How would that be received? It turned out to be THE all-time biggest box office hit of any foreign language film.
To those of us who saw the original, that was not a surprise. I cannot recall a more intense film ever among the thousands of films I have attended. The acting was superb, the claustrophobia was palpable, the fear that these young, mostly 17 to 18-year-old sailors would drown was immense. Who would have expected that any film could make us root for the survival of German submariners on a mission to blow up Allied ships? That is proof of the strength of this most powerfully emotional film.
It is 1941 when the Allies have finally gotten the upper hand in the air and in reversing the havoc their ships had experienced until now. Germany now had few planes, and few ships. In a bar in port, there are many sailors enjoying their last night before sailing. Everything goes. Drunkenness and women. Tomorrow, who knows?
A Captain of a sub enters, almost dead drunk. He makes a speech and toast to "our wonderful Fuehrer who knows everything including all about submarines." This is obviously sarcasm. In the film, there is only one officer who is political and believes that Hitler is right. The rest are there because they were drafted. They want to do their tours of duty and then get back home to their loved ones.
The film is about the submarine U-96, its Captain (played heroically by Jyrgen Prochnow), and his crew. They are on a mission to sink British ships but the Captain knows that the British destroyers are now equipped with Sonar devices that can locate with deadly accuracy the whereabouts of submarines and when they drop their depth charges, they know how deep they must go before exploding and destroying the subs.
Almost everything that can happen to a submarine takes place on this one and it is nail-biting time almost from the start until its surprising finish.
Which brings us back to the Director's Cut. The film has had better sound added (digital) and extra footage. This additional footage lingers more on the sailors and tries to show more of what they are experiencing. There is no question that the new sound and footage are beneficial, although the original was itself sheer perfection.
Now then, the down side. The original DAS BOOT kept us in a sweat precisely because we did not know what was going to happen next. Could the bolts that were popping from the severe pressure be replaced so the water could be stopped from drowning the ship and crew? Could the ship be raised when it dives way down to avoid the depth charges? How will they make out when the ship is ordered to pass thru the narrow Straits of Gibraltar where there are hundreds of Allied ships on the lookout?
That is what gets lost in this new version if you have seen the original. If you have, you know what happens next, you know how the film ends, so I would question if there is a real value in seeing the 3-hour-plus Director's Cut. If, of course, you have NOT seen the original, you had better get to this one; a most marvelous, exciting film, ranking with THE most anti-war films ever made.
The cast of supporting actors, all wonderful, consists among others, of Herbert Grshemeyer, Klaus Wennemann.
In German with English subtitles.
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
4 Bytes
4 bytes = Superb 3 bytes = Too good to miss 2 bytes = Average 1 byte = Save your money
Ben Hoffman
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews