A propaganda movie 60 years late

Rating: 2/10 (5 March 2017)

This movie uses great effects and realistic settings, but the rest is fantastic superhuman nonsense. The U-571 was never captured by Americans and was sunk with all hands off the coast of Ireland by British aircraft, so I hope nobody gets his history from this. The Germans were furthermore quite humane when treating survivors in the sea, and while they could not take them on board, they rarely shot them all or deliberately killed them. The German navy commander Karl Dönitz was not found guilty of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. In fact, in 1942 the captain of U-156 tried to rescue survivors from a sunken British ship after radioing the allies, only to be attacked by American bombers which killed many of the survivors on the deck of the U-boat and forced it to dive, which killed the rest. The allies often killed German sailors who survived sunken U- boats or left them to die even when they could have saved them. This film is also short on realism. The German movie Das Boot was criticized by former U-boat sailors for its portrayal of depth charges being too close to the U-boat and not sinking it. Well, this movie had the depth charges a lot closer, the hull shaking like crazy, yet no rupture or major leaks occur. Depth charges don't have to hit the craft; they're designed to cause a crack or dent in the hull, and water pressure does the rest. Machine guns that fired from a German destroyer were enough to compromise the hull's integrity, but the boat still dives beyond its accepted limit after all that with no problems. The ability of a handful of men to operate a damaged foreign U-boat to achieve all these deeds and still survive to tell the tale is about as fantastic and unrealistic as you can get. It's a propaganda film with all its cheesy music, of pure good us versus pure evil them, and a pretty unconvincing one.