The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)
IN CONTEXT
GENRE
Action thriller
DIRECTOR
Wolfgang Petersen
WRITERS
Wolfgang Petersen (screenplay); Lothar-Günther Buchheim (novel)
STARS
Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer, Klaus Wenneman
BEFORE
1953 Charles Frend’s The Cruel Sea, the story of a British corvette protecting a convoy from U-boat attacks, establishes the World War II naval thriller genre.
AFTER
2009 Samuel Maoz’s tense war movie, Lebanon, which tells its story entirely from the inside of an Israeli tank, is compared to Das Boot by film critics.
Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (The Boat) is an action movie set almost entirely in the narrowest, most claustrophobic space imaginable—a German U-boat during a single voyage in World War II. The story follows the anxieties of the crew in such a way that our attention, like theirs, is gripped within this undersea vice of iron and rivets.
After a brief scene in which the crew carouses in a French bar before a mission that seems to fill them, and the viewer, with a feeling of impending doom, the U-96 departs La Rochelle and heads deep into the North Atlantic. There the boat intercepts Allied convoys, is heavily damaged in a depth-charge attack, then makes a perilous attempt to slip undetected into the Mediterranean. Das Boot is not a movie about heroes; its characters are all ordinary men whose survival depends on each other. “You have to have good men,” says the apolitical, battle-hardened captain. “Good men, all of them.”
Das Boot has been released as a movie and as a TV mini-series with added scenes. In 1997, a 209-minute director’s cut was released.
An antiwar war movie?
Lothar-Günther Buchheim, on whose novel the movie was based, criticized the movie for being too exciting to convey the antiwar message he intended. This echoed the view of the French director François Truffaut, who said that a true antiwar movie was impossible because such movies inevitably made war thrilling. Not all critics agreed with Buchheim. Audiences came out of the movie drained physically and emotionally. Petersen’s movie does not depend on thrilling action sequences, though there are those. Rather, it oscillates between tense moments of danger and the tedium of weeks of fruitless hunting, in which the relationships between crew members becomes fraught. The movie’s grip is in its psychology rather than in its action sequences. As its tagline said, it is “A journey to the edge of the mind.”
“The sea cannot claim us, Henrich. No ship is as seaworthy as ours.”
Captain Lehmann-Willenbrock / Das Boot
Putting us in the boat
Das Boot’s power stems from the director’s determination to attain realism. He makes viewers understand what it was like to be in a wartime submarine, attempting desperate repairs, running out of oxygen and time. The movie was shot almost entirely inside a real U-boat (on dry land), which could be tilted to 45 degrees to simulate a sudden dive. Two techniques contribute to the heightened realism. The first is an innovative use of sound. When destroyers are circling above the U-boat, all we hear in the silence are the sonar pings ringing off the hull, or the ferrous groaning and popping of rivets as the boat dives to a dangerously low depth. Second is the cinematography of Jost Vacano. Despite the cramped space, Vacano used a handheld camera to create a sense of intimacy, training himself to run through narrow spaces and over bulkheads. The effect he created has influenced a whole generation of movies.
Nerves become strained as the mechanics desperately try to figure out a way of refloating the U-boat before it becomes crushed by depth pressure.
WOLFGANG PETERSEN Director
Wolfgang Petersen is Germany’s leading director of action movies. Born in Emden, Germany, in 1941, he studied theater in Berlin and Hamburg, before enrolling in the Berlin Film and Television Academy, after which he was making movies for television. In 1974, he directed his first feature, the thriller One of the Other of Us, and then in 1977 the controversial Die Konsequenz, a movie about gay love. But he made his name with Das Boot, which gave him the prestige to direct Hollywood thrillers such as In the Line of Fire with Clint Eastwood, Outbreak (1995) with Dustin Hoffman, and the hugely popular Air Force One with Harrison Ford, Gary Oldman, and Glenn Close.
Key movies
1981 Das Boot
1993 In the Line of Fire
1997 Air Force One
What else to watch: In Which We Serve (1942) ✵ The Cruel Sea (1953) ✵ Above Us the Waves (1955) ✵ The Enemy Below (1957) ✵ Sink the Bismarck! (1960) ✵ The Hunt for Red October (1990) ✵ Crimson Tide (1995) ✵ Lebanon (2009)