Infotainment at it's best

Rating: 7/10 (20 December 2009)

Recap: A dramatization of the events leading up to, and after July 20 Assassination Plot to kill Hitler and install a new government. Count Colonel Stauffenberg returns to Berlin after being severely wounded, with growing doubts of the war and Hitler's government. He joins a group of highly ranked officers that conspire to overthrow Hitler and end the war. The operation centers on the contingency plan Valkyrie that is to be activated if Führer is dead. The plan is to assassinate the entire leadership with a bomb, planted by Stauffenberg himself, and claim that rouge elements of the SS is behind the coup. Then, with the aid of the army, they must take control of Berlin.
Comments: Based on actual events, and from what I can tell it is pretty true to the actual event, even if some parts must have been dramatized either because of effect or because of uncertainty of what really happened. Either way the story really works well as an action-thriller, with or without connecting it to the real events. It's dramatic, it got a lot of tension and some twists as well.
And for once I really thought that Tom Cruise acted well again. He has done many good movies, but in the last few years I haven't been impressed at all. In Valkyrie he shows that he hasn't lost it all. But maybe what impresses me most is that they honor the true events in such detail. Right down to the cast, they have managed to assemble a highly merited and veteran cast with many respected and well known actors and still keeping that the actors actually should resemble the person they are acting as. Cruise and Steuffenberg is does really resemble each other, and so does Nighy and Olbricht, Stamp and Beck, Wilkinson and Fromm and so on. It gives the movie a certain edge in credibility and plausibility.
Enjoying the war genre, it is not hard to like Valkyrie. But it actually accomplishes to be both entertaining and interesting, in such a way that I had to check what really happened (and discover how true it seem to be). Actually a high level of infotainment. Recommended for everyone with the least interest in war movies or recent history. Or hopefully both.
7/10