Thursday, July 5, 2012

Das Boot (1981):

Starring: 
Jürgen Prochnow - Capt.-Lt. Henrich Lehmann-Willenbrock - Der Alte Herbert Grönemeyer - Lt. Wener
Klaus Wennemann - Chief Engineer Fritz Grade
Hubertus Bengsch - 1st Lieutenant
Martin Semmelrogge - 2nd Lieutenant
Bernd Tauber - Kriechbaum - Cheif Quartermaster
Erwin Leder - Johann
Martin May - Ullman
Heinz Hoenig - Hinrich

Director:
Wolfgang Petersen (Troy; Air Force One; The Perfect Storm)

Rotten Tomatoes: 98%
Flixster: 94%

Synopsis:

The claustrophobic world of a WWII German U-boat; boredom, filth, and sheer terror.

Review:
I hope you have 3 hours of your life that you want to be moderately entertained & bored at the same time. The basic concept of the film is, you're watching a bunch of German's trapped in a U-Boat growing facial hair.... There is almost no plot to the movie, which makes it slightly pointless at times. It follows a very simple & formulaic story of get discovered by the British, dive, wait for depth charges, injuries to the crew, British leave, relax, eat, repeat. The production value is pretty low, even considering it's 1981. You can clearly see that the boats in all outside views are model ships in a tank of water. Every crew shot of outside the boat is poorly done in front of a green screen. It's very hard to review a film that is spoken in a language that I do not speak. Either your watching the movie in German with English subtitles, or your listening to it in poorly dubbed English. I chose the later. It's very hard to pay attention to acting when your reading subtitles the whole time, but then with poor dubbing you can't really tell how well their acting is. The good part is however that Prochnow dubs his own lines in English which works perfectly. The only thing that was stupid about it was that all of the English voices they had dubbed in were so campy & over exaggerated to the point of novelty & stereotyped. Funny moment in the film is during the climax, an extra is laying on the ground & I guess during editing they ran out of time, or no one noticed but he is clearly looking up at the camera, then 2 seconds later lays down as if dead, only to have an explosion go off 5 seconds later & him to flinch majorly. Just fucking silly. I loved the concept of the film, but it has aged poorly over the years & I can only imagine how bad it looks on DVD (I watched it on blu-ray). 

40%

Lead Actors: 5/15
Supporting Cast: 5/15
Plot: 3/10
Compared To The Genre: 7/10
Cinematography: 10/20
Intrigue: 5/20
Extra: 5/10

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