Good but could have been better

Rating: 7/10 (17 March 2005)

Der Untergang was a good movie, but actually it did not quite live up to my expectations. First, I would have preferred a classic dramatic plot structure, rather than this docu-dramatization. The storytelling style was that of a bystander and not a filmmaker. I think the movie could have been much more effective with a more stylized narrative structure.
Also, the movie didn't really go into the political philosophy aspects of Hitler's Nazi regime. There were tiny snippets of it in the dialogue, but the monstrosities, pseudo-science and sheer idiocy of the Nazi ideology were barely touched upon at all. And the Jews weren't even mentioned until the movie was almost over.
I don't know the decisions underlying these choices of what to show and what not to, but I did not feel we got the whole story, nor an adequate impression of the nature of Nazism (and thus of Hitler). We got a personally focused "reality"-style drama mostly set in a bunker - we got as incomplete a picture of the whole as some soldier who had been present in the bunker at the time would have gotten. Not a heck of a lot more.
Still, it was a serious and no doubt cathartic movie (for the Germans), and it opened up some sore wounds and commenced the process of healing them. The acting was great, and I have no objection to showing Hitler with a human face - though a lot of people may not realize it, Hitler *was* a human being. The monstrosities he was part of was not wholly of his doing; it was to a very great degree a result of larger social trends in the population at large. No one among the ordinary people knew where it would go, so no one can be blamed. We can only learn from our mistakes and do our damnedest not to repeat them.
7 out of 10.