Better than expected, but still an anti-national socialist propaganda movie

Rating: Null/10 (25 September 2004)

I have mixed feelings about this movie. Acting is impressive (even if the actors impersonating the German generals are unable to reproduce the hard, metal-like Prussian cadence), special effects are well-made, and it nicely conveys the depressive and claustrophobic feeling of the cramped life in the bunkers. It also conveys an adequate feeling of war's brutality.
The plot refrains from the most obtuse stereotypes of anti-National Socialist propaganda, and truly depicts some human sides of Hitler and his entourage. However, it remains a very unbalanced representation of reality, intended to impress the viewer's mind with political and ideological prejudices. For example, all Nazi characters wishing to carry on the fight - from high-ranking SS officials to Hitlerjugend kids fighting on the barricades - always fall in one of two stereotypes, either that of the unthinking, automaton soldier speaking in a machine-like way, or that of the equally unthinking, naive kid automatically repeating the slogans impressed upon him. On the contrary, all characters purporting a quick surrender are represented as wise and judicious individuals, speaking in warm overtones from the wealth of their life experience.
The movie's worst aspect consists its portrayal of Hitler. Instead of depicting the dialectics of rigorous lucidity and rambling illusions, of stern self-control and furious outbursts that characterized the dictator's last days, the film brings to life a rambling old man who has lost nearly all contacts with reality. In this movie Hitler is no religious prophet and political genius, partially broken by the immensity of defeat and bad health conditions, but a madman babbling his nonsense to an audience so foolish and subservient as not to see its obvious foolishness - a poor travesty of historical reality.
Whenever Bruno Ganz enunciates one of his most infamous (to the believers in the political religion of human rights and racial equality) precepts, he always does so in an especially rambling and stuttering way, and such principles are extrapolated from their context, to produce an impression of bleakness and near-madness. This tendency is made obvious in the scene where Hitler dictates his political testament: since there was no way to twist the text in the byproduct of an impoverished mind, we are just allowed to hear its first few words, then the scene is quickly shifted. In other cases this approach leads to historical falsification -- it happens in the scene where Hitler is asked what to do in case ammunition is entirely spent. Fest, in his "Hitler. Eine Biographie", unequivocally states that the dictator answered that in this case defenders should try to flee by small groups, while in the movie Ganz furiously waves his fist and mumbles "I shall never capitulate, never!".
The movie makers' tendentious intentions are made even more plain in the final scene, where a smiling Frau Junge travels away with a newly found stray kid, and the clouds part in the far skies, to impress on the viewer the idea that a nightmare is now over, and that a new and better age is starting for the survivors of Nazi madness. The short interview to the real Frau Junge, which is incorporated in the end segment, makes the movie's political underground impossible to miss. This movie does not attempt to impress the viewers with problems and interrogations, allowing him to find his own answers; instead it attempts to impose answers on him, defaming the National Socialist world view.
All this notwithstanding the apprehensions expressed by some members of the Establishment, that this movie could mitigate the effect of regime antifascist propaganda, are in my opinion justified: as the movie slanders National Socialism in a less coarse and loud way than usual, it shall be probably able to impress the herd's minds with lesser force.
Finally, this movie is probably the best that can be filmed on this subject under the present political regime; it has several bonus points, yet each viewer, especially young viewers, should go to the box-office conscious of its preposterous background.