Irresponsible Fiction, but quite exiting anyway.

Rating: Null/10 (9 March 2001)

Ok, so some people might say, 'gee but it's only a movie, stop bitching about the history and enjoy it'. What they don't appreciate is the massive potential for the media, and films in particular, to change the public perception of history. Just look at how Shakespeare has changed the public perception of King Richard III. Everybody accepts it as common knowledge that he was a hunch backed evil tyrant because Shakespeare says he was, for the sake of creating a great evil character in his drama. In fact Richard was a good looking and generous King. This is just one example from history. It is irresponsible to dress up fiction about history as truth, because people will believe it.
It worries me that future generations will get a distorted view of WWII because of movies like this changing the facts. OK, so that might not worry you American viewers much, as you say it is your movie. But it does worry us when our county went through so much destruction and suffering in order to keep up the fight for freedom, on our own. My family lost members and friends who were serving in the Royal Navy and Merchant Navies trying to keep Britain alive in the fight against the nazis. We beat the German U-boats, we decoded enigma, and we saved our own country from starvation. It is deeply offensive to those who died to say otherwise. How would Americans feel if we made a movie which claimed that the British army liberated France alone? It would be deeply offensive to your dead who made such a big sacrifice to save Europe from the nazis.
Apart from all this there are dozens of technical errors in the film, which would be pedantic to go on about, but these ruin the film for anyone even vaguely educated. German destroyers never went into the North Atlantic, they got blown out of the water as soon as they left the Baltic sea. A single engined German reconnaissance plane in the Atlantic? Duh! Don't think so. Yet they were supposed to be outside ALLIED air cover!! A British destroyer half sinking a German sub then leaving it alone on the surface?? American submarine sailors fighting as sea borne commandos?? A German sub sailing around on the surface near British waters? They would have been blown out of the water by the Allies, never mind any Germans!! Only a complete dim-wit could watch any of this without laughing.
Apart from all this the film is actually quite exciting! If you go and watch it taking it is a fantasy then you might enjoy it. The sad thing is kids will go away believing what they have been fed is fact.