US patriotic garbage

Rating: 1/10 (10 May 2010)

This is what happens when you think you already know everything there is to know about a subject and don't do any research. Jonathan Mostow's ignorance is the main problem of this movie; he had his mind made up on what submarine warfare was like in ww2, and didn't see fit to base his opinions on historical facts. Having been a deciding factor in defeating the Nazi Germany, the US should be able to make pro-US movies about ww2 without resorting to historical distortions, inaccuracies, and blatant lies. U-571 is, from a historical accuracy point of view, as bad as it gets. As the History Channel reviewers wrote - they got one thing right: there were indeed German submarines in the Atlantic in ww2. Almost everything else is wrong, and not just the history, but the technical and tactical aspects as well. The impossible sinking of a German submarine in the beginning illustrates this point well. A US submarine disguised to look as a German boat (?! as welding some stuff on the conning tower would fool experienced sailors whose lives depend on the ability to recognize other ship classes from large distances. An S-class with a weld job conning tower looks like an S-class with a weird conning tower, not a type XIV German resupply sub) docks next to a German submarine pretending it's a resupply boat. They take over the ship by surprise. But they have a bit of bad luck as a real German resupply sub appears and torpedoes the US submarine. Really? At that time the Germans used type XIV resupply submarines, which were modified IXD's. They didn't have any torpedo tubes, so if this was a resupply boat how did it fire from a non-existent tube? Unless the Germans used a regular type IX to resupply the ship in haste.. but that doesn't make sense either - resupply subs would generally hold positions all over the Atlantic, so it would be a lot faster to just redirect a nearest type XIV already stationed in the Atlantic then send a type IX from Lorient or Brest. Anyway with the US sub sunk the surviving US crew on the captured German sub do an emergency dive, even if they have no idea how to operate the ship and every control is marked in German, a language most of the crew don't speak. Then somehow they magically obtain a firing solution on a submerged German submarine and torpedo it under water (an impossibility at the time). I won't even go into the facts that at the time this movie is supposedly happening the US wasn't even in the war, and the stealing of Enigma wasn't done by the US but by Polish operatives and later on the British.
Skip this garbage and go watch "Das Boot" again, this movie isn't worth the medium it's recorded to.