Truth Stranger Than Drama

Rating: 9/10 (20 January 2007)

I think that in a thousand years of Western History, there has not been a more dramatic saga than that of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. No screenwriter could come up with a harder hitting tale than the rise of a man like Hitler and his eventual demise. It seems too incredible in an era of constant entertainment that this actually took place, but what makes it even more amazing is the way the whole story ended.
The whole history really took place in an astonishingly short time period: Hitler rises up out of epic conflict, spreads his evil message to his villainous followers, people join in his evil plots for their own self interests and lust for power, they spread misery and destruction over the world with their fantastic destructive weapons, and finally they are vanquished and driven by their enemies underground where they die at their own hands, while their country is destroyed around them...No wonder fiction writers have been working on this same basic premise for more than sixty years.
This story is not fictitious. This is one of those rare movies where the real events could only have differed only slightly from what is depicted on screen. This is an amazing decision on the filmmaker's part, to unfold the events in a semi-documentary fashion, to avoid dramatic overacting, which is too easy to do in depicting these types of people, and provide an unbiased look at the events of the end of the war.
There have been a lot of movies made about Hitler's last days, but I think the reason this one stands out is that it unfolds at such a calm and steady pace. Certainly here is the best depiction of Hitler on-screen. Too human? Maybe, but that makes him all the more disturbing. Viewers might question how far each evil Nazi officer is removed from each one of us, and whether we might have the guts to take a higher path when it comes down to it.
I would have liked to have seen a few more battle scenes featuring individual combat, but the movie squeezes a lot of info and characters into its running time, and not a shot is wasted. Among war movies it's most similar to "The Longest Day", and like that film it works because it stays away from nationalist sentimentality. Very disturbing, but entertaining and fascinating all at the same time.