Almost faultless

Rating: 10/10 (2 August 2010)

Downfall has to be one of the best movies ever made.
I have just watched the DVD (which includes extensive extras about the making of the film, interviews and biographies of the subjects), which makes the third viewing for me. There are few movies that I care to see this many times.
Small errors of continuity aside, the impressive attention to detail, the casting, the acting and direction, sets, cinematography, sound - everything about this movie is to me just about perfect. The fact that it was made for 13m is astonishing: many Hollywood movies with a fraction of this class would have shelled that out to the lead star.
Casting such a story - the last few days of the Third Reich, mainly in the Berlin bunker to which Hitler and his coterie of believers retreated - presented a near-impossible task. Recent history, especially when so freely documented and photographed, allows only a small latitude with character portrayal: finding actors who so closely resembled the players such as Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and the rest and were capable of playing them so well has been brilliantly achieved.
Much of the outdoor action was filmed in St Petersburg, Russia: a whole street was taken over for nine days and changed into wartorn Berlin to remarkable effect. The logistics behind this alone merit total admiration.
In some ways it is remarkable that it has taken so long to bring this story to the screen in this genre, and it is a tribute to the German people that it came about at all. The decision not to dub an English track over the original German, but instead to provide subtitles, might be seen by some as incorrect: in many films this would be so, but here it is absolutely right. The full impact of the Fuhrer's ranting, his malevolent diatribes, can only be appreciated by listening to them in German, whether one speaks the language or not.
If you haven't already seen this film, do yourself a favour and buy the DVD. If you *have* seen it - do yourself a favour and buy the DVD.
(Edited, 31st Dec 2010: The proliferation of YouTube clips of the Fuhrer throwing his toys out of the pram shows how a truly awful monster can be laughed into history as an aberration in the human race.)