'Grim' Look At The Nazis' Final Hours

Rating: 8/10 (18 September 2007)

Wow, what a grim movie. How I stuck with this for 155 minutes, I don't know, but it's a fairly involving story once you get into it and you want to see how it's all played out.
A main reason I use the word "grim" is that there are more scenes with people committing suicide in this movie than all the movies (thousands) I've seen put together.
This German movie deals with the last days Of Hitler and the Nazis in Berlin in April of 1945. In the end, most of the people in the film either kill themselves, as mentioned, or execute their loved ones in order to avoid capture by the Russians, who overtook the city. This includes poisoning a group of young children.
While not overly gory, some of the scenes are shocking, ones I suspect would linger in anyone's memory..
Bruno Ganz as Adolph Hitler was intriguing, to say the least. As an American, I can recall very few, if any, films in which Hitler was shown to this degree with this much dialog. Being such a famous figure in history, it was one of the reasons, frankly, I stayed with the film. I never this man portrayed on film.
Alexandra Maria Lara as "Traudl Junge" was the bright spot in this dismal story, a beautiful and wholesome-looking woman with an expressive face. She was the only character in the film that I cared about. Everyone else is pretty cold. Junge "won" the job as a secretary for Hitler and is pictured as sweet and naive woman...and just one more of the millions of victims of World War II. Victims can be survivors, too, as the story concludes, if for nothing else, for suffering with a guilty conscience for decades.
This war movie definitely can be classified as "different" and memorable. I doubt if I'd ever watch this again, but it was worth the one viewing, that's for sure.