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Das Boot Movie Review

Das Boot is a 1981 German war film directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Jurgen Prochnow among others. It’s a pretty overrated movie.

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“Alarm!“

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It is set during World War II and follows German U-boat U-96 and its crew, as they set out on a hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. It depicts both the excitement of battle and the tedium of the fruitless hunt, and shows the men serving aboard U-boats as ordinary individuals with a desire to do their best for their comrades and their country.

My main issue with this film is that it’s way too long. Admittedly, I watched the director’s cut which is even longer, but still the movie is way too long regardless. It bored me due to its excessive length and an emphasis on action and thriller elements without delving deeper into its themes and emotions.

The characters themselves are okay. They are not particularly well developed, but are solid for a war movie and the actors playing them all did a good job without a doubt. But the direction from Wolfgang Petersen is not particularly good in my opinion as the entire film plays out as repetitive and tiresome.

There are some moments to be fair in Das Boot where we see the humanity and the struggles of the submarine crew. The movie is undoubtedly anti-war in its sentiments and very realistic in its depiction of submarine warfare and also fittingly dark and desperate in its atmosphere.

There is also no denying that its technical aspects are all admirable. The movie is intense, the submarine looks amazing, the cinematography is particularly effective at making you feel trapped and claustrophobic with all these men and the score is very good as is the sound of course.

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But technicalities do not make a movie great and Das Boot is simply too shallow and simplistic to appeal to me honestly. The dialogue is so sparse that it really bothered me, thus the emotion and characterization suffered seriously. The plot overall is slight and the movie is focused so much on action and thriller elements that it quickly became dull.