Great movie.

Rating: 10/10 (30 March 2008)

This movie probably provides the best dramatic treatment of Adolf Hitler. Unlike other movies that tend to present Hitler as a caricature, this movie opts to portray Hitler as a historical person and not as a clown. Although it is easy to reduce Hitler to a subject for mockery, this movie avoids that temptation and instead presents an Adolf Hitler the person whose actions are made even more sinister, baffling and amazing by the sheer banality of his existence. In this movie Hitler is shown not as a hysteric, not as the bombastic political actor, leader and rabble rouser familiar in all too many documentaries, but as a frail, broken, disillusioned man whose dreams have been shattered and whose closest advisers have all but abandoned him. Yet, even as Hitler himself realizes that his demise is all but inevitable, the movie shows how the cohort of secretaries, clerks and party flunkies who formed Hitler's personal staff refused to leave him and opted to stay with the Fuhrer to the bitter end. This level of devotion to a failed and doomed head of state is perhaps unprecedented in history. While the Third Reich was crumbling they stayed with the man who was responsible for the destruction of their country. Yet the same man who was capable of ordering the conquest of entire countries and the extermination of entire peoples was also capable of individual acts of kindness that makes his career all the more baffling to the audience. Can the personality and career of Adolf Hitler ever be fully explained? Maybe not, but this excellent movie at least provides a plausible glimpse of what Hitler may have been about and how his dreams of new world order came crashing down.
Also, special mention must be made of Bruno Ganz's uncanny resemblance to Adolf Hitler. Mr. Ganz gives what has to be the most outstanding cinematic portrayal of Adolf Hitlee. Mr. Ganz succeeds in portraying Hitler as a caricature and instead provides a credible and even-handed portrayal of a person whose actions have been the cause for the kind of scorn and mockery that obscures who Hitler was as a man.