American Military Pornography

Rating: 2/10 (28 December 2001)

This is yet another epic film about heroic Americans stepping into a situation, destroying everything, and creating an unhealthy and polarized sense of morality (the good Americans kill the evil Germans). You could label this film racist... perhaps acceptable when the propaganda was necessary (in the 40's), but certainly not 50 years after the fact.
The film also fails to capture a good sense of life in one of these submarines... since the film concentrates on military glory and good triumphing over evil, the potentially powerful, subtler moments of suspense are hopelessly lost, and the film degenerates into a muffled confusion of trumpets and excessively justified violence.
It is impossible to watch this without thinking of Das Boot, and how much more powerful the cinematography and directing are, not to mention how much more tolerant and accurate a picture it paints of the morality of warfare and of Germans as real people during the war.
My rating is 2/10 on this film, because it has wasted a potentially powerful concept on mindless and destructive entertainment, questioned Germans as human beings, took millions of dollars to do it, and is essentially a cultural regression from its ancestor Das Boot, made 20 years prior.