I wrote a college paper on this event so I knew the story pretty well before seeing the movie. In fact, I was a tad apprehensive to see the movie as I was afraid it would be a joke. It wasn’t so bad.
The pros: I thought it was visually stunning; the uniforms, the landscapes, the buildings, and the cars all appeared genuine. The events, for Hollywood, were depicted fairly accurately, even if it was way condensed.
The cons: The entire movie was spoken in a mix of British and American English, which was a little hard to stomach. It should have been in German with subtitles. The German language has many nuances and emotions that can’t be translated, so they were simply lost. Tom Cruise played Lt. Kaffee from A Few Good Men, but this time he was wearing a Nazi uniform. They could have chosen better, I think. The Hitler and Goebbels characters were also too subdued. I don’t think the Himmler character spoke a single word.
Out of 5 stars, I’d give it 3, mostly for the visuals and the fact that the movie was made. It’s a fascinating chapter in German Nazi history.
I’ve seen it, but hadn’t read any specifics about the incident. I thought it was pretty good. especially if you hadn’t read deeply about it before, it was interesting to see how big a conspiracy it was, and how it was to be pulled off.
Tom Cruise reportedly signed on adfter seeing how his profile shot resembled that of his character. The profiles DO look similar, but otherwise I don’t think they loook that much alike.
Interestingly, the actress playing his wife apparently also did so in a German movie on the same subject.
Seeing as Trantino has successfully released a popular WW2-themed movie using actors speaking no less than four languages on occasion, there is simply no excuse for this shit any more.
Popularized or duped? There was no foreign language spoken in any of the trailers or commercials with the exception of Hitler’s “Nein, Nein, Nein!”. That was an intelligent choice because some movie goers really hate subtitles (not me). The same thing happened with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I saw it a couple times in the theater and witnessed people sighing and sometimes even walking out after realizing it was going to be all subtitles.
I’m all for foreign language films, even if they are American made. I just think the people with the money for these projects still doubt enough of the public will line up for them like a Spider-Man or Harry Potter.
I second this - I loved Inglourious Basterds as much as I hate spelling the title, and have highly recommended it to several people, whom, upon being informed that there were a goodly number of scenes with subtitles, balked because “they don’t like readin’ none, ‘specially not at dem movin’ picture shows.” :rolleyes: *
*Middle Georgia linguistic challenges only slightly exaggerated for effect.
It depends surely on the audience. Certanly a movie like Valkyrie is never going to have the same type of appeal of (say) Spider-Man. It isn’t even trying to.
I don’t think that having so many subtitles has hurt Inglorious Basterds so very much, simply because its target audience - like that for Valkyrie - is naturally going to be more interested in different things: for every potential viewer unwilling to see it because of subtitles, it will attract some who value it for its craftsmanship, simply by virtue of the fact that its potential audience is already somewhat limited by its very nature.
I’m sorry, this doesn’t make sense to me. If the audience does not understand German and is relying on sub-titles, how does that better convey the nuances and emotions of the German language, compared to a script written and spoken in English? Are you saying that the non-verbal cues and the raw sounds of German would convey something beyond the meaning of the words, and that is what would be lost?
That seems a bit of a stretch to me, sorry. But I didn’t see the film, so maybe I’m missing some vital bit of information.
Roddy
I don’t think a day has gone by since I saw GB that I haven’t thought about it, read about it, searched for something, or simply sat and mused. On the flip side, I saw Valkyrie shortly after it came out on DVD and haven’t given it a second thought since. It may be because I got over my Hitler kick a long time ago but, really, if I want to spend my time watching a WWII docudrama I think I’ll just put Der Untergang on repeat.
Steal it instead. Or, worse, make someone else pay for it.
Don’t get me wrong: the production values are quite good, it’s not a truly AWFUL movie, and they did their best to stick to facts within Hollywood restraints (ref. U-571). It’s just that I knew the story from several different angles and I knew how it ended.
“But you know how Der Untergang ends, too!” shouts the peanut gallery. To which I say: Yup, but Hitler, Traudl, the Goebbels, and Eva showed me what life was like in that infamous Berlin bunker in April 1945, two years after Tom Cruise’s Lieutenant Kaffee failed to complete his impossible mission.
2- Anybody who knows that World War II so much as happened knows the plot didn’t work and most who know anything about Nazi Germany even know how close it came to working (the being nudged aside under the heavy table yadda yadda) and that it ended in a bloodbath purge
And VALKYRIE offers nothing new; it’d be kind of like TITANIC if it had just been a retelling of a ship full of rich people hitting an iceberg with the Romeo & Juliet throw-in. It doesn’t even have a decent afterward blip.
The Countess von Stauffenberg might have made a better focus as her story hasn’t been told in the many other movies. Totally unmentioned in the afterwards: after her husband’s execution she gave birth to their fifth (and obviously final) child in a concentration camp. (A reminder that a concentration camp and a death camp were two different things and she was treated more like a PoW than a Jewish detainee in that her life was certainly no picnic but neither was it Treblinka.) Her elderly father was executed in the purge that followed his son-in-law’s plot, her mother died as a probable suicide the following year, her children were taken away and entered into Hitler Youth foster homes and she spent the rest of the war being shuffled around. They would all be reunited at war’s end so unlike VALKYRIE there is a sorta kinda happy ending (until the kids say “So where’s Gam-gam and Paw-paw?” at least) and the Countess lived until 2006 (she died at 93).
Or better yet, a fictional cloak and dagger intrigue set with a backdrop of the Valkyrie plot with characters to whom anything the writer wants to happen to them can happen. While no doubt Tom Cruise had never heard of von Stauffenberg before, most people have and there was really no crying need to tell the story again when there’s so many begging-to-be-told-on-screen espionage stories from Nazi Germany that haven’t been.
