Not Das Boot

Rating: 1/10 (19 April 2005)

I know it's dangerous going to a movie with expectations, but not knowing very much about "Downfall" except for its excellent reviews here at IMDb.com I was anticipating something like "Das Boot" with brown dirt for green water.
As a film this drama's execution is quite superb. The audience seems transported into Hitler's bunker during those last days of the war. The city above is a wreck, and so is Hitler. Boys and girls and the elderly must take up futile positions against the advancing Soviet troops. No need for another plot synopsis here -- it's been well covered by the previous posts here.
Somewhere into this long and very engaging movie a chill set in. Yes, these Germans were real people, not monstrous demons, and this movie wasn't portraying their days here as heroic, but... Then something very odd struck me: during the scenes where the solitary Hitler contemplates his inevitable end, a poignant music plays in the background. It sounds familiar and my mind reaches back to my music school days to place it. It's from Johann Sebastian Bach's Mass in b-minor, specifically, the Crucifixus. Here in the film score, it appears sans words and chorus, but the music is distinct and powerful. Originally intended to evoke the tragedy and sacrifice of Jesus Christ ("he was crucified for us, made to suffer and was entombed...") here it is an offense. Is this the real point of view of the film, is this its purpose? To portray Hitler as a grand person who suffered persecution and betrayal?
Or am I reading too much into what is only an element of the drama? Well, Albert Speer is portrayed as a dapper (an architect in a suit rather than a minister in a uniform), intelligent, urbane, and compassionate man. He and Hitler have a conversation about their lost future over Speer's model of the Berlin that was to be. Yet wasn't Speer beloved of Hitler out of a compatible grandiosity? Wasn't that Berlin-to-be dominated by a palace with a dome a thousand feet high? Didn't this cultured architect become Hitler's Minister of Weapons and Armaments and ruthlessly use slave labor in the service of the Third Reich? In this film, he is a rather unfortunate artist caught up in the whirlwind of the times. No way.
No doubt the Germans were real people. How did they get talked into this grand, barbaric, and murderous scheme? Yes, they were like us. So could this happen to us too? Don't see this movie, don't shed tears for Hitler, and don't even entertain the notion suggested in this movie that he was a persecuted and betrayed savior. Don't participate in the rehabilitation of Nazism.