![]() ![]() There’s more to see, but it’s more diffuse, and the continual cutting between the land story and the sea story gins up the suspense while making individual scenes more perfunctory.įor three-plus episodes, those stories build in a reasonably interesting and plausible fashion. The story has been expanded into a conventional modern TV production, with its international cast and its multiple intertwined plots to fill the many hours. One noticeable effect of the 38-year gap since the film is the improvement in special effects, even on a TV budget - the scenes on the water look immeasurably more lifelike. (Nazi sailors on shore leave are a violent crowd.) ![]() At first determined to prove her loyalty to the Germans, she falls in with the French resistance, not because of Nazi atrocities but for love and female solidarity. Vicky Krieps plays Simone Strasser, an Alsatian translator whose brother is aboard U-612. While U-612 zigs and zags around the Atlantic on a secret and highly improbable mission, the real star of the series scurries around La Rochelle. Once again there’s a noble captain (Rick Okon in the Jurgen Prochnow role) stuck with a zealous Nazi (August Wittgenstein) as first officer. The result is an odd hybrid: The maritime section of the story follows a different boat, U-612, that somehow keeps having misadventures - a strafing, a fall to the sea floor - that closely mirror those of U-96. ![]() The eight-episode first season, drawn again from Lothar Gunther-Buchheim’s 1973 novel “Das Boot” and also from a later book of his, “Die Festung,” was originally announced as a remake of the film but then repositioned as a sequel. On the evidence of this handsomely produced show, though, the main benefit of opening up the story is gaining access to a whole new set of World War II cliches. Granted, you’d have to be pretty fearless to set eight hours of TV aboard a submarine, in the manner of Wolfgang Petersen’s film, which took place almost entirely within the confines of the ill-fated U-96. This German-British production, released Monday on Hulu, is a surf-and-turf proposition: Half the action takes place aboard another cramped U-boat while half takes place ashore, among the Nazi occupiers and French collaborators and resisters of La Rochelle, France, where the boats are based. Petersen is now back in Germany to make his first German-language film since Das Boot, a reworking of his 1976 TV movie Vier Gegen Die Bank.īavaria Film’s decision to produce both a feature film and, in 1985, an extended TV series version of Das Boot is a textbook example of mutually beneficial collaboration between film and television, which was recognised with a Bafta and International Emmy.Fans of the emblematic submarine adventure “Das Boot,” an international hit in 1981, may be alarmed by descriptions of the new “Das Boot” television series. Its success led to Petersen’s upward trajectory he shot $30m fantasy film The NeverEnding Story (1984) and sci-fi drama Enemy Mine (1985) at Munich’s Bavaria Film Studios, where Das Boot had been made, before moving to Los Angeles and blockbusters such as In The Line Of Fire (1993), Air Force One (1997) and Troy (2004). The mother of all submarine movies, Das Boot remains streets ahead of other nautical epics such as The Hunt For Red October (1990) or Crimson Tide (1995) thanks to its slick action sequences and unbearably claustrophobic tension.ĭirector Wolfgang Petersen even suggested that cinemas should provide sick bags as cinema-goers were likely to feel seasick - something he probably kept in mind when shooting The Perfect Storm (2000) and Poseidon (2006) in Hollywood with an array of digital effects at his disposal.īilled as Germany’s most expensive post-war film, Das Boot was seen by 20 million cinema-goers in 120 countries and grossed $22m, with $12m coming from the US alone (according to Mark Damon of Producers Sales Organisation).
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