Well-made, but annoying

Rating: 2/10 (3 February 2005)

There is no doubt that the actors and the sets are great. But this is all I can say in favor of this movie.
The movie does not know what to focus on. There are the scenes in the bunker, which are fine, but get boring with time, and there are the scenes in the streets of Berlin. You get to see the suffering of the civilian population and the "ordinary soldiers", but most remain without a face. One who has a face is a military doctor who could have gone but decides to stay in Berlin and help the wounded soldiers. Others are a group of youngsters, some boys and a girl, trying to fight the Soviet tanks.
There have been complaints about this movie that it shows Hitler as a human being. I have no problems with that - after all, he was human. I have problems with the rest of the characters. Except Goebbels, who is rather nasty, Goebbels' wife, who is such a fanatic Nazi that she murders her own children so that they don't have to grow up in a world without Nazism, and Eva Braun, who is rather foolish, all the other people in the bunker are very nice and reasonable, trying to convince Hitler to leave Berlin and trying to make him see reason and reality (i.e. the reality that the war could not be won any more.) They try to persuade him to save the civilian population (also called the German people) and the soldiers outside. Hitler refuses to do that, saying the people had not deserved anything better, because it had been too weak.
The same holds for the people outside. They are suffering soldiers and civilians, and some heroic men who hold out and try to help the suffering. One of them is the doctor I mentioned above. Yet he is a member of the SS - not of the Wehrmacht. Still he is shown as a good guy who has no flaws. There are two scenes of people being killed as deserters or collaborators, but they last only a few seconds, and these few people who fought against the Third Reich are left without a face and a story.
So in spite of the movie's claims just to show what "really" happened and not interpret history, it has a message: Hitler (and perhaps Goebbels) were crazy, all the rest were nice people and Hitler's victims.