Inferno

Rating: Null/10 (18 March 2005)

The deepest impression I had emerging from the cinema after two-and-a-half hours was the vision of an inferno that uncannily reminded me of scenes I saw a month earlier in the same cinema, in Constantine.
The next thing that hit my mind was that Downfall is not about Hitler, at least not largely about him. The screen time allocated to this character is not as much as you would expect, and after his death, the movie goes on for another half-hour. It is more about the downfall of Berlin, mainly reflected in events surrounding Hitler and company, about the city's degeneration into the inferno we see.
Even for those of us fortunate enough to have been spared WW II, the mere mention of the word "Hitler" conjures up images of monstrosities that make the blood boil. It's therefore difficult to view Downfall with a detached and objective frame of mind. But then, this movie does not really show us Hitler as such, but only shows him during the last two weeks of his life. The point I'm trying to make is that this movie does not achieve the effect of showing Hitler in a favorable light, even if there's such an intention, which I doubt. If I can express this graphically, what we see is just one tiny little segment of a circle called "Hitler".
But even within this very tiny segment we see of Hitler, there are things that firmly point to the Hitler we understand him to be. For example, when told that what he is ordering is to send boys out as young soldiers to die, his reply is "Isn't that what's they're for?" And here, he's not talking about Jews, but about people who are going to be the future of Germany. I rest my case.
So we see Hitler the mad man maybe a little madder than usual in his last two weeks. We also see different people around him reacting differently. Most chilling are those who look absolutely in control, but whose minds have in reality been totally warped by him. Topping this list are the Goebbels, particularly Madga. Others fall in different positions in a wide spectrum. Outside the underground Bunker where these people are hiding, there is an even greater variety of people reacting differently to the bombardment of Berlin, the devastating destruction of life and city and the menacing approach of the enemy (i.e. the Red Army). All these unfold in front of our eyes in an epic of inferno proportion.
We are not spared the graphic atrocity of limbs saw away live by army surgeons, half a head appearing right beside someone coming around after a shell explosion, just two among many scenes that speak even louder than those in Saving Private Ryan. By comparison, blowing a brain out, a common occurrence in Downfall, is banal. Adding to the total experience, with the incredible sound system in the cinema I went to, my chair shook every time there was an artillery shell explosion on the screen.
Painstaking attention has been paid to the camera work in this movie. This is quite important in a dramatized documentary of this sort, when there is really no story line for the audience to hook on to. Instead, what I found most stimulating was that almost every frame displays a different construction: varying angles, positioning of objects and characters, panning, still shots, various points of view  endlessly changing so that you're always looking forward to the visual stimulation of the next frame, even when the story may not always sustain the same level of interest.
At the end of the movie, we are told what happened to each of the more important characters, from receiving judgement at Nuremberg to vanishing completely and never to be found. This rounds up the movie with a good historical perspective, allowing the audience to leave the cinema a little less stunned and dazed from the harrowing experience they've just had.
So is it good? Yes, and ground breaking in some ways. Is it good enough to win the Oscar? No, particularly when there's a movie called Mar adentro in the running.