Now, the film rarely, if ever slows down so much that your investment is dislodged, leaving the film to, at least for a moment, slip into underwhelmingness, but things do indeed slow down more often than they should, and such an event grows more and more recurring as things progress, creating something of an inconsistent pacing that disengages, and makes this film's being oh so very overlong near-impossible to ignore. The earlier acts of the film move a bit too steadily, but make up for slowness with a reasonable degree of liveliness and color in order to flesh the story out, but after a while, when all of the fun and games tone down a bit, the film really starts to drag, never to where it's boring, but to where it takes on some relatively dull spells that mark particular heights in the blandness that loom over to many places during the film's body. There's enough humanity in characterization for you to buy into our leads as more than just types, and it's not like genericism taints any other aspect of this story, but you'd be hard pressed to not recognize more than a few of the lead characters more than you should, as they are, in too many places, conventionally built, reflecting a moderate degree of laziness that does damage to the final product's kick, though most decidedly not as much as pacing limpness. That being said, this film still isn't quite as upstanding as they say, being a quite smooth ride and all, but one that hardly sails on without taking some damage.Ĭertainly, this extensively meditative character drama is a generally genuine one that has enough inspiration behind it to be taken seriously, and yet, with that said, the final product takes some very surprising, often offputting lapses in seriousness by turning in quite a bit of comic relief, much of which is kind of cheesy and falls flat as detrimental to tonal evenness and, by extension, the film's momentum as a character piece, which is hurt enough by conventionalism within the writing of our characters. Still, it's not like you're likely to fall out of this film, no matter how long it may be, because this rewarding opus sure does know how to keep you going. Yeah, I watched the uncut version of this film, don't judge me, because it was good, but after seeing that, as well as the director's cut, I think it's safe to say ich habe mehr als genug Deutsch für eine Weile hatte. No, that's just an ignorant American joke, and the Germans have a cool language, as well as some good films, such as this one, which better be good if it's going to keep me going for two-and-a-half hours with its theatrical cut, three-and-a-half hours with its director's cut and, of course, almost five hours with its uncut. This film sounds cheesy enough as it is, what with it's being about, I don't know, a bunch of Germans hanging out in a giant boot that is adrift at sea or something to that effect. Hey, it's either that or, "We all live in a German submarine, German submarine, German submarine", or, perhaps even, well, no lame song reference at all. Season two opens with a thrilling series of above-ground plot points, all poised to interlace: a French resistance operative working as a double agent in an SS-operated police department a grieving soldier desperate to find his abandoned daughter a too-trusting senator’s son and the U-boat engineer he scooped up out of the sea, schmoozing through the nightclubs of Harlem."- Rock das boot! - don't rock das boot, baby - Rock das boot! -, don't tip das boot over - Rock das boot! -, don't rock das boot, fräulein!". How Das Boot achieves this is by taking a lot of the water out but keeping the claustrophobia in. But with that smooth patina of Big Budget TV over the top of it, Das Boot becomes compelling to an audience wider than – and I’m using my own father as an example – “men who go to the library twice a week solely to take out non-fiction war books about U-boats and chain-smoke roll-ups while reading them in utter silence”. Obviously, an atmospheric, no-fun drama set in the simmering cauldron of a second world war submarine – where danger surrounds you, both from the murky waters above and from the complicated hierarchy of men, young and old and grizzled and green, who all have differing levels of dedication to the wartime cause – isn’t for everyone.
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