Surprisingly good

Rating: 8/10 (10 January 2009)

I have to admit I came to the movie with a Tom Cruise bias. A friend of mine who is also a movie nut - and I agreed that in almost every Cruise movie he has to run away from an explosion of some kind.
That being said, I had to brave a traffic jam in Sacramento (on a Saturday even) and missed the North Africa sequence, about the first 8-10 minutes of the movie I heard.
All that being said from what I do know of my WW2 history this was technically accurate. Of course unlike the usual thrillers one knows the outcome beforehand, but it was nevertheless an attention-riveting movie.
I finished a good book on Rommel, and he is not mentioned anywhere in the movie. I do know that he was implicated in the plot, and I believe he was to be installed in the "new" govt to negotiate with the allies. Rommel was one of the few Nazi generals respected by the allies, not only for his tactical brilliance in North Africa and France (I view him as a German Robert E. Lee), but his humane treatment of allied prisoners - against Hitler's orders - in North Africa. He was forced to commit suicide because of his involvement in the plot, although he took no part in the planning; only a passive involvement.
Also while there were many brave Germans involved in this plot - I read somewhere that 5,000 were killed by the Nazis in the aftermath - one does not get a feel for the widespread and terrible repercussions in the movie. I was pleasantly surprised that his wife Nina and her children survived and Nina died only in 2006.
A historian said of this plot that it was "too little and too late". It would be easy (and futile) to speculate what would have happened had it succeeded - Roosevelt and Churchill agreed on a principle of "unconditional surrender" - in part to keep Stalin from making his separate peace - although Churchill (and many German officers admitted later) that with nothing to lose, it meant that Germans would continue the futility of fighting with many needless deaths after D-Day.
That being said, I still enjoyed the movie. Didn't want to wait the 45 minutes for the restart to see the North Africa sequence so I will probably get it on the DVD.