All Is Lost!

Rating: 10/10 (31 July 2005)

Berlin April 1945: The Red Army has launched it's last great offensive of the Second World War with a massive armored and infantry assault on the German capital. Deep inside a bunker underneath the German Reichstag is the German Fhurer Adolf Hitler, Bruno Ganz,and his general staff conducting the last desperate defense of the city but time is quickly running out with even the most fanatical and optimistic of them, with the exception of Hitler, know that the end is near and are looking to somehow escape from this hell on earth or at least negotiate a surrender with the attacking Soviets forces. It's these historic days during the spring of 1945 that are covered in the movie "Downfall".
Explosive and blood-splattering film with an Acdemy Award caliber performance by Bruno Ganz as the German leader Adolf Hitler as his nation is being clobbered with daily and nightly one thousand plane bombing raids from the air and with millions of allied troops, on two fronts,swarming across it's borders on land putting an end to the Third Reich that he brought into power in Germany back in 1933. The total pandemonium that struck that city is realistically and graphically depicted in the movie that's based on the memories of Hitler's personal secretary Traudl Junge, Alexandra Maria Lara, who was working for him in that capacity since 1942.
One of the best movies about Hitler ever made has him shown in a very different light then the usual portrayals that were used to seeing him in the scores of films made about Hitler, and WWII, over the years. Wild threatening and hysterical towards his generals when things aren't going right, which in the movie was almost all the time, Hitler showed his "human side" when it came to his personal staff. Insisting that they leave the city before it fell to the dreaded Red Army and also being grateful to them when they refuse and wanted to stay, and kill themselves, along with him when the end came.
There's a great scene in the bunker when Hitler realizes that the "great offensive" that he expected by German General Steiner's 9th Army, to smash the Soviets and throw them out of Berlin, never materialized because he, Steiner, didn't have the men and tanks to do the job. Completely losing it and letting his generals have it Hitler at last finally realized, with the later defection of his two top honchos SS leader Himmler & second in command Goering, that the war was lost. Hitler then instead of trying to escape from the doomed city decided to stay at his post, as the German Chief of State, until it's defense was no longer possible then end it all by putting a bullet in his head.
Terrifying scenes with blood and guts and body parts flying in all directions with even the Germans themselves, the Army and Nazi Gestapo, shooting hundreds of German soldiers and civilians who were trying to flee the city, to save their lives, for disobeying orders and not standing and fighting to the last man and woman like their Fhurer ordered them to.
With all the horrors in the movies "Downfall" the one that struck me most, even though it was very minor compared to the rest of the carnage in the film, was the murder by the Nazi Misnister of Propaganda Joseph Gobbels and his wife Magda, Ulrich Matters & Corinna Harfouch, of their six young children by poisoning them as they were asleep. Determined to both kill themselves the Gobbels' didn't even want their children to survive the war saying that there's no reason for them to live in a world without National Socialism or their "beloved Fhurer" Adolf Hitler or uncle Adolf as he was efficiently called by them. the movie "Downfall" showed more then anything else how right the Union Civil War General Sherman was in his famous statement "War is Hell".