Better off as a "Made for TV" movie

Rating: 5/10 (4 January 2009)

First off, I agree with those critics who found Tom Cruise utilizing an American accent while the other actors are all speaking in polished British accents, a big mistake. The film's verisimilitude is compromised quite a bit by Cruise's inability to convince us that he's truly Klaus von Stauffenberg, a sophisticated Army officer from an aristocratic German family.
That said, Valkyrie wasn't as bad as I expected it to be. It's basically a by-the-numbers recreation of the last plot to kill Hitler. While it lacks suspense (since the film's climax is a forgone conclusion) it does ably depict who the players were and how they concocted and carried out the failed assassination plot.
Valkyrie fails in the area of character development. We never get to know any of these characters as multi-dimensional human beings. Director Bryan Singer chose to tell his story purely as an action-adventure movie. On the plus side, the movie looks like it was filmed at some of the actual locations especially the scenes shot at the "Wolf's Lair" which looked pretty realistic.
The most objectionable aspect of 'Valkyrie' is elevating von Stauffenberg to hero status. While certainly he was courageous, he was no hero. Had Germany been winning the war, it's not likely there would have been as many assassination attempts as there were. I find it difficult to believe that most of the conspirators were primarily motivated by a moral imperative.
Daniel Goldhagen, in his brilliant book "Hitler's Willing Executioneers--Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust", informs that von Stauffenberg's own brother admitted that in the sphere of internal politics, "we had welcomed the basic tenets of National Socialism for the most part...The concept of race seemed sound and very promising." Their objection was merely that its "implementation was exaggerated and carried too far". Stauffenberg's uncle, Count Uxkull, stated "We should hold on to the concept of race as far as possible."
According to Goldhagen, one of the central documents of the resistance to Hitler, prepared at the beginning of 1943 by leading Protestant theologians and university professors, explicitly condemned genocide but still argued that Jews caused trouble for Germany, that a "Jewish Problem" existed, that the Jews had harmed Germany and that a "solution" was necessary that would prevent future harm to Germans.
Valkyrie might have been better as a 'Made for TV' special. Instead of spending all that money about a minor footnote in the history of the Third Reich, wouldn't it have been better to focus on the complicity of the overwhelming majority of the German people who either enthusiastically embraced Hitler or looked the other way as he successfully carried out his nefarious plan of genocide and attempt at world domination?