History Skewed Beyond Repair

Rating: 1/10 (2 January 2009)

This film is being falsely advertised, but not too false. Based upon a true attempt to kill Adolf Hitler and using the names of the real people who tried, the second half of the film is total fiction & the plan is fiction as well.
Even though it is framed so well by the writers, reality gets left behind after the explosion attempt. The group that Col Stausser headed in the attempt to kill Hitler really did not have an exact plan what to do if they were successful. That is what makes the second half of the film and especially the scene with the attempted arrest of Henrich Himmler total fiction as this never happened.
What really is missing is the prime motivation for why the group was trying to kill Hitler. The true historic motivation for this group was nothing to do with freedom from Hitler. While they wanted to kill Hitler, their goal was to bring back the Kaiser. They were hoping that by restoring the German Monarchy, they could end the war before Germany was destroyed by the evil madman.
The film depicts the group as nearly pulling off this military coup and this did not happen. Every German knew about Hitlers plans for slaughtering Jews from Mein Kamp. Jews had a bad time in Europe when the war started as Stalin was sending them to death camps in Siberia just as quickly as Hitler was.
The only things the film can get credit for is looking authentic while the mix of English, American & German accents get mixed, and correctly pointing out that the day of the bombing in the Wolfs Lair, that El Duce (Benito Musselini), deposed Italian was there. It also points out correctly at the end of the movie who gets shot for the high crimes.
The suspense music seems to repeat itself a lot in the film, too often. Some folks might this Cruise getting shot is good, but actually this story has been done better than this film version where because of their lack of motivation, it is difficult to understand why the movement is here at all. I sure wondered about it when the film ended.