![]() These often succeed in the immediate response (usually crying) but fail to impact the viewer on anything more than a surface level. So often, films which aspire to move the audience quickly fall into melodrama, over-acting, and overblown images. Part of the "power" of the film comes, I think, from a certain restraint in the direction. To say this film is "powerful" seems so weak a description. How few films are there which affect the viewers on this level. I could not shake the images, and now some fifteen years later, I still remember how completely meaningless the movie made everything seem, and the nihilistic message stayed with me for a long, long time. When I woke in the morning, I felt as if I were escaping through the hatch of the submarine. ![]() I saw this film when I was a freshman in college during a weekend that I later dubbed my "depressing movie festival." (The Wall and Apocalypse Now were the other weekend "entries.") Of these films, it was Das Boot that haunted me-when I laid down at night, I saw Jurgen Proctow's pained blue eyes. ![]() ![]() Here is a movie that explores heroism, duty, patriotism, hope, fear and the futility of war-all grand themes-explored in the confined, and collapsing, spaces of a German u-boat. Maybe it is true that epic themes make the greatest novels and films. Das Boot is not just a great war film: it's a great film period.
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