Excellent if formulaic war movie

Rating: 7/10 (21 May 2000)

Writer/director Jonathan Mostow knows the formula for an exciting story and that is good for everyone looking for an entertaining adventure yarn. I can only recall one discontinuity. Matthew McConnaughy's character punches Erik Palladino, and in the next shot Palladino doesn't look as if he's been punched at all. But such glitches are rare. Another criticism: While it is refreshing that Mostow wants to convey that his characters are scared even when they do brave deeds, the director has McConnaughy spend more than half his screen time with his eyes wi-i-ide open. But I quibble. This story is fun for many of the same reasons that "Star Wars" (1977) is fun although "U-571" is much darker. You have the hero, Lt. Tyler, who wants to be a skipper, but he isn't ready because he doesn't know how to make risky decisions. (Trust in the force, Luke.) The hero has two mentors and one dies off early just as Obi Wan Kenobi died off surprisingly early. Nice touch, giving him two mentors, because then we don't have to believe the hero learns his lessons from the dead mentor only. Realistically, he needs more than one lesson, as anyone does. Whereas a fantasy like "Star Wars" can have Obi Wan come back as a ghost, a gritty combat film must have a living mentor to be credible. The hero's initiation into the adventure is made more tense when he is kept in the dark about the mission until the crew is out to sea. Adding a sinister element of mystery is Jack Weber as Lt. Hirsh, a secret operative who is forced on the crew whether they like it or not. (Is he from signal intelligence, a precursor of the NSA?) Hirsh along with David Keith's Marine intelligence officer, immediately suggest that there are secret forces at work--even among the crew. In an eerie, disorienting scene, Hirsh exposes the fact that the radio operator (Jack Noseworthy) speaks fluent German, something he has kept hidden from crewmembers for fear of being identified with the enemy. In other ways, the language difference between the Americans and their enemy is exploited for tension: What if your life suddenly were to depend on operating a vessel on which all the controls are labeled in a foreign language, and you have only two men capable of running around the ship, translating for your crew? The hero in "U-571" faces one edge-of-your-seat challenge after another as he learns to command "on the job." The tough situations become tougher and tougher until the climatic scene in which the hero not only gets to blow up something big (not quite the Death Star, but then Darth Vader isn't aboard, either), but he learns the final grim lesson of command in the process. The equally grim moral question that is implicit here goes unquestioned by film-maker Mostow, but then the hero's lesson is precisely that he does not have the right to hesitate about life-and-death decisions. Unless you avoid war movies like the plague, you won't want to miss this exciting film. By the way: Yes, the movie is fiction. The British, not the Americans, caught the first German Enigma machine on a U-boat. And they didn't have as difficult a time bringing this war-winning elixir back to their "tribe" as do the crew in "U-571." According to the legend on screen at the end, the first two or three Enigma's were found by British ships and then a US ship caught another one near the end of the war. I hate to quibble further (or do I?), but the part of Eddie (Terrence "T.C." Carter), the black cook who gets to play an equal role as the crew dwindles, bears on the film's rather unrealistic treatment of race relations. Except for an early comment about how he finds out important things because white officers heedlessly speak in front of him as if he were not there, no further reference is made to the servile role forced upon African-Americans in the US Navy during World War II. No one expresses a lick of prejudice toward Eddie. Even when the Germans are accused of being prejudiced (by Eddie), they are never given the chance to show it. I think the film-maker's defense is that all historical movies are really contemporary stories; "U-571" portrays race relations as they ought to have been rather than as they were. To complete the Star Wars analogy--for now at least-- Hitler is the ultimate Darth Vader but since this story is more realistic than Star Wars, it is about men fighting a small but significant piece of the war against Hitler, not the pitched battles we so often see in Star Wars where there is the possibility of taking out Darth. (Though, Darth is not really the head of the Evil Empire, is he? But lets not niggle.)