Wolfgang Petersen
Das Boot

The second Battle of the Atlantic was the longest and most intense military campaign in history, whose outcome was decisive for allowing the Allies to win the war. From '39 to '45, the terror of the seas had the menacing and stealthy silhouette of the German U-boats, which swarmed across the ocean with the precise aim of strangling England by cutting off its supply lines. This film tells us how this struggle was experienced by those who ultimately lost it.

Shot in 1981 after meticulous and careful pre-production, based on the bestselling namesake written by war correspondent Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Das Boot makes realism and narrative conciseness its core and strength. Director Wolfgang Petersen, who later moved to Hollywood and mostly high-budget, low-level productions, also writes a script with a documentary style, striving to give the clearest and truest idea possible of the Battle of the Atlantic.

The plot is very simple: Lieutenant Werner, a war correspondent who must show and glorify for regime propaganda the glorious saga of U-boats and their crews, boards the U96, a type VIIC submarine that in 1941 departs from La Rochelle to intercept allied shipping in the Atlantic, with all the events and dangers connected to a war mission. It’s Germany's war, which has thrown itself into the wild abyss of Nazism, striving to dominate the world and fight against powers known - but chosen to be ignored - as invincible. The commander, Der Alte (The Old Man), knows it, portrayed by the ice-cold eyes of a great Jürgen Prochnow, and Werner will also discover it: beneath the thick, oily layer of rhetoric and mystification, Nazi Germany is actually already destined for defeat. Not even the empty and boastful talks of Goering heard on the radio, the contemptuous words toward the enemy sonar's ticking, or the zeal of the young Nazi midshipman can long disguise this truth.

The disillusionment of the officers and the commander, who seems to face everything with a resigned, proud, and ironic stance, reflects a real historical fact, also confirmed by contemporary scholars like Ludovic Kennedy, according to whom propaganda, especially from 1943 onwards, hardly affected the members of the Kriegsmarine. Whether it was because these sailors were engaged in a lonely, harsh war difficult to sugarcoat, far from any civilization and with which they had to deal every minute of their lives, or because the officers were in many cases the same veterans who in their youth had fought under the imperial flag, the fact remains that the dream of victory and German world domination does not illuminate the dark and damp recesses of U96. One might think that it's a convenient choice by the producers aimed at ideologically distancing themselves from Germany's terrifying past, but the dry and blunt tone of the film and historical data help us dismiss this hypothesis.

Moreover, the anti-militaristic and condemnatory message is evident: nothing is lamented or celebrated; it is only a matter of showing a reality, that of the struggle against men and the sea, of promiscuity, of the empty onboard routine, of the soul and memory rotting like food as the days at sea lengthen. The film fully achieves this goal with phenomenal technical apparatus: the special effects are excellent and the sets are meticulously detailed (the production built two life-size replicas of the type VIIC along with several scale models), the sound is extraordinary, and the depiction of onboard atmosphere is engaging at the highest levels. The sweat, the smoke of explosions, the concussions of depth charges filter through the screen, especially in the impressive Gibraltar scene, where the pinnacle of tension is reached. The sight of men struggling to repair breaches, diving into the mechanical darkness of the submarine, transcends war imagery and suggests the specter of other wars, that of man against machine and machine against nature, of life against death, which still awaits, always and anyway, the U96 and its cargo of madness. The ending confirms how senseless and mad the Nazi 'crusade' against the world is, how ephemeral and pointless the struggle for survival of an infected idea and of a people who, consciously or unconsciously, have chosen the path of destruction. The U96 is the ship of the damned that drags across the vastness of the ocean and history this curl of deviant humanity, both guilty and victim of itself, fighting its daily battle made of miseries, privations, terror, and exhilarating yet futile victories. Even the famous musical theme, both epic and deeply tragic, fits well with this sensation of death and inevitable defeat.

Technically impeccable, Das Boot is a bitter and intense film, performed at high levels and very engaging. Rightly rewarded by critics and audiences, its effectiveness and realism are sometimes dampened by a Teutonic aesthetic that, especially in close-ups and dialogues, reveals its profound heaviness and penalizes several scenes. Still, it's a film worth watching for its realism, its logical and tragic inevitability, the extraordinary achievement of a suspense that very few thrillers or horror films manage to match.

I recommend the 2004 uncut version, perhaps exhausting at 293 minutes yet represents a ride of claustrophobia, despair, and tension that will be hard to forget despite an Italian dubbing that isn't always up to par.