Shoot the Glass

Das Boot (1981, Wolfgang Petersen)

It’s not often we get to see “the other side” of a war. Clint Eastwood did it recently with his Letters from Iwo Jima, but it’s rare. Usually, if we are shown the German or Japanese side of WWII, they are portrayed as villains. What Hollywood has failed to grasp is that not every German soldier necessarily believed in what he was fighting for.

That’s why this movie is remarkable. Petersen not only shows us the daily lives of the men on this German submarine, but he makes us care for them, and we don’t even realise that we are, in fact, rooting for the Nazis.

I saw the director’s cut of this movie. It is long (209 minutes), but well worth it. Care is also taken by Petersen to make the movie as authentic as possible. He used replicas of actual submarines, which lends the movie an extraordinary amount of tension and claustrophobia. We spend almost every minute of the movie in the boat with them, underwater, and it’s extraordinary the amount of suspense it brings.

As for performances, they all come off as genuine and honest. Jürgen Prochnow who plays the Captain, is a force of nature. A complete badass.

My favourite scene(s) was the whole Gibraltar sequence. It feels so real, to see them stuck down at the bottom of the ocean, and you’re never quite sure if they’re going to make it out of there alive or not. It was absolutely gripping stuff.

This movie is gritty and exciting, yet sad. It shows us the futility of war in an excellent way. It’s one of the best war movies I have ever seen, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

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