Historical fallacy but superior actioner

Rating: Null/10 (25 June 2000)

In the wartime Battle of the Atlantic, a crucial element in the success of the U-boats was the Germans' Enigma encryption system. This film suggests that the turning point in the Allies' breaking of the code was the assault on U-571 by an American submarine crew led by Lt Andrew Tyler (played with some stoicism by Matthew McConaughey) in the Spring of 1942. In fact, the Enigma machine and code books were first captured from U-110 by a British boarding party from the Royal Navy's ship the `Bulldog' led by Lt David Balme and the incident occurred on 9 May 1941 - when the Americans were not even in the war.
`U-571' tries to compensate for this historical travesty by including in the final credits a dedication to the `Allied' effort on Enigma and dates of two British as well as one US capture of vital material. However, I'm one of the few people I know who sit through such credits and, by the end of the war, the British had actually captured 13 Enigmas to the Americans' one. Is it really necessary commercially for Hollywood to portray the Second World War as consisting of heroics exclusively by characters of its own nationality?
Historical fallacies aside, this is a superior action-adventure movie and director Jonathan Mostow has created a fine addition to the long submarine genre flowing all the way from `Run Silent, Run Deep' (1958) to `Das Boot' (1981). He may have paid more attention to the technical details than the characterisation, but there is sustained tension and continual action, assisted by excellent special effects and superb sound. You can almost feel the sweat.