Poster of Das Boot

Das Boot

Drama, War

Director: Wolfgang Petersen

Release Date: February 10, 1982

Where to Watch

I discovered that randomly I am into submarine movies when I saw Kathryn Bigelow’s K-19: The Widowmaker so Das Boot was always a must see in my queue. It must be hard to be a German filmmaker or actor who wants to make war movies because Nazis. Wolfgang Petersen mostly succeeds at making viewers commiserate with the Germans’ plight by taking great pains to distinguish them from the Nazis and rehumanize them as people with ordinary lives and loves outside the U-boat. Jürgen Prochnow, aka the German actor who always plays a German member of the military who is not a Nazi in films set during the Nazi era, stars in Das Boot as the captain. Das Boot is 3.5 hours long so watching it at home is problematic because it requires your full attention because it has subtitles and has subtle transitions. I started to fall asleep after 1.5 hours. Das Boot may perfectly depict the pacing of war, but to be truly immersed in the rhythm of Das Boot, you need to be in a theater. Also it does not matter how theoretically sympathetic I am to the Germans’ humanity, they are still shooting at the good guys so I wanted them to lose, which means that a lot of the emotional resonant scenes lose their impact. If you have an opportunity to see Das Boot in the theater, give the classic a shot, but it is far from a timeless classic. The music is dated and jarring. Also Das Boot’s premise seems like a historical fiction. Not every German was a Nazi, but the Nazis were elected by a majority so while I am sure that many Germans were tired of the realities of war, they initially supported Nazis, and that is part of their human story.

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