Doesn’t get a lot of acclaim these days, but Petersen gets a lifetime pass from me for Enemy Mine.
Ouch, that stings. “Das Boot” is a masterpiece, and “Enemy Mine” has a special place in my heart.
ETA: and I forgot: “In The Line Of Fire” also was a brilliant variant of the classic Hollywood big blockbuster, with a president…
A shame to lose him but “das boot” is a stone cold classic.
Even now, some 40 years later my stock reaction to any random warning bell, beep or buzzer is to shout out in a thick german accent “ALARM!”
Only a few people get it sadly.
I saw Das Boot at Filmex when it came out. (Also George Romero’s Knightriders.) I’d had the book for years, but never got around to reading it until years after I saw the film and I noticed it on my shelf.
IMDb link.
Sadly, the last English language film he made, back in 2006, is the Poseidon remake. And before that it was Troy. Just keep scrolling past them to see much better stuff.
A really skilled director, who I think was not served well by H’wood and deserved much better. While I know a lot of people whose childhoods included 10,000 rewatches of The Neverending Story on VHS, I always found it a bit too precious for my liking. In The Line of Fire and Air Force One are practically parodies. The only movie he made in the States that I really liked is Outbreak, which is a bit of a tough rewatch these days for several obvious reasons.
That said, Das Boot is absolutely brilliant, one of the finest and best-constructed war movies of all time. When I was in film school, for reasons too boring to get into here, I got to go to the premiere of the director’s cut, which was pretty mind-blowing (and butt-numbing). The afterparty was great…had a very surreal conversation with Jürgen Prochnow which will always stick with me.