Valkyrie... Valkyrie... Valkyrie Profile (SPOILER ALERT)

Rating: 6/10 (20 June 2009)

Valkyrie: 6 out of 10: Roger Ebert pointed out a fundamental problem with Valkerie in his 1975 review of The Hindenburg. “How can you thrill people with the saga of a dirigible floating across the Atlantic Ocean? We know it is going to blow up over Lakehurst, N.J.; but we also know, alas, that it's not going to blow up before then.” The story of Valkyrie makes for a kick ass documentary. It is a fascinating tale; a great map of what ifs and almost happened(s). It is not however major motion picture material. In fact, I recently read a review of that Jews in the forest movie, Defiance, that Valkerie shared the theater with last December. The Defiance article perceptively pointed out that the story of people not being found by Nazis does not, by itself, naturally lend itself to a good film treatment. Needless to say, the story of people (SPOILER ALERT) not blowing up Hitler also runs into this same problem.
Now, not all films that have a forgone historical conclusion need to fall into this trap. Titanic, for example, hits the iceberg fairly quickly and a successfully shoehorned a love triangle to give the audience a reason to pay attention. (Lightning did not strike twice as Pearl Harbor tried the exact same trick to much derision.) Titanic is but one example, Apollo 13 made us care about the characters to the point that we forgot that everything would work out. More importantly, Apollo 13 was about more than just a retread of what happened. Too often Valkerie comes across as a strange documentary where all the Nazi’s are British. While the story is fascinating on its own right, we do not go to the movies just to be shown what happened. We want to feel for the characters as well.
Tom Cruise took a lot of flak for making Valkerie. It overall was undeserved. Though his performance failed to reach the audience emotionally, one could hardly place the entire fault at Cruise’s doorstep. The script really did not give him much to do. Valkyrie is a strange this happened then that happened story with little emotional reflection. In fact, both Kenneth Branagh and Bill Nighly seem more out of place in the film than Cruise. (In addition, why exactly again, outside of Cruise, are all the Nazis British? Wouldn’t that be like a Japanese cast playing Chinese peasants in a Rape of Nanking drama.) Speaking of British Nazis, Britain’s 2007 Equality legislation may have been in the filmmaker’s mind as they shoehorned poor Carice van Houten in as Cruise’s wife and basically the only woman in the cast. She sticks out. For one thing, she does not even look British and speaks with a weird continental accent. Oh and the script drops her as a character just when it would be useful to give us a reason to care about the (SPOILER ALERT) Germans failure to kill Hitler.
Speaking of (SPOILER ALERT) not killing Hitler; one thing the movie neglects to mention is where were tall these Good German officers when Germany was winning the war. After all, it was only after the successful Normandy invasion and the collapse of the eastern front that Hitler all of a sudden needed to be killed. Where were these folks when the German army was marching through Paris and at the gates of Moscow? Yeah that is what I thought. It is somewhat hard to make a movie when the “good guys” come across as opportunistic scum.
Overall Valkerie is a well-made movie with a predictable and emotionless story. It is hard to root for traitors (no matter how noble) and the movie gives one little emotional reason to do so outside of the obvious fact that they are trying to (SPOILER ALERT) kill Hitler.