The issue of loyalty-to country, family, comrades and self-is fundamental to both Simone and Hoffman’s plights, and sporadic references to Germany’s waning war prospects (due to the Americans’ involvement) further informs characters’ noble and/or dastardly motivations. There’s also plenty of skulking around at night, and secret meetings, to these proceedings, but everything about them feels old hat, this despite Krieps, Caplan and Wlaschiha embodying their roles with conviction. There are more complications to Das Boot’s narrative, including the fact that Frank, who’s also in league with these rebel fighters, has fathered a child with a Jewish barmaid. Making matter stickier, Simone’s office is visited by Gestapo officer Hagen Forster ( Game of Thrones’ Tom Wlaschiha), who’s hunting the very people with whom Simone has unwittingly become involved, and who develops fond feelings for Simone that she doesn’t reciprocate. Before departing, Frank gives Simone a package to deliver, which quickly entangles her with an underground resistance cell run by Carla Monroe (Lizzy Caplan). While Hoffman and Tennstedt spar for power, and their subordinates engage in a number of mini-quarrels meant to make them more than mere background extras, Das Boot also takes up with Simone Strasser ( Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps), a translator transferred to La Rochelle on the very day that her radio-operator brother Frank (Leonard Schleicher) winds up shipping out on U-612. This further unnerves Hoffman, who’s wet behind the ears and seemingly too evenhanded and levelheaded for a Nazi regime that prizes cruel decisiveness. Once aboard the cutting-edge craft, discord grows between the two men, and is amplified by Tennstedt spreading rumors about Hoffman and behaving in borderline-insubordinate fashion. Hoffman is a thoughtful, sensitive leader, and his appointment sits uneasily with First Watch Officer Karl Tennstedt (August Wittgenstein), a Nazi hardliner who views Hoffman as too wimpy for his post, not to mention a pale shadow of his illustrious dad. Unfortunately, those two strands wind up cancelling out each other’s effectiveness: by spending so much time topside, the submarine sequences never build requisite tension, and yet when diving below the surface, Das Boot throws into sharp relief the conventional nature of its landlocked drama.ĭirected by Andreas Prochaska with a formality that gets the job done but rarely inspires much excitement, the story begins in La Rochelle, where Klaus Hoffman (Rick Okon) is made captain of U-612 after testifying against an underling for cowardice-and, also, because great things are expected of him due to his father’s renowned WWI service.
It’s a have-it-both-ways strategy designed to provide the familiar underwater thrills of its ancestor as well as more traditional wartime espionage on terra firma.
#Dasboot tv series#
Betz’s series (based on Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s original novel Das Boot as well as its sequel Die Festung) opts for a far more expansive perspective, splitting its 1942 action between events inside brand-new sub U-612 and those in La Rochelle. Petersen’s film derives its power from its cramped, limited purview, and the pressurized atmosphere that mounts inside the sub.
Set almost entirely inside that vessel, it’s an extended exercise in confined, claustrophobic suspense, leaving larger political questions for its periphery as it maintains rigorous focus on its milieu and the men (led by Jürgen Prochnow’s Captain) forced to endure a harrowing ordeal. Petersen’s epic-available in versions that range from 2.5 to 5 hours, with a 3.5-hour director’s cut largely considered its definitive iteration-concerned Nazi Germany submarine U-96, which in 1941 departs occupied La Rochelle, France, and heads into oceanic danger. Such is unfortunately the case with Das Boot, a new eight-part Hulu series (an international acquisition produced by Bavaria Fiction, Sky Deutschland and Sonar Entertainment that was first broadcast overseas late last year) that premieres on June 17, and picks up where Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 submarine classic Das Boot left off. They’re handsome facsimiles, going through their motions with precision and care but incapable of leaving a lasting mark-much less living up to the esteemed legacy of their predecessors. Even when these continuations are made with considerable skill and effort, they all too often fall short of justifying their fundamental existence. We live in an age of sequels, prequels, reboots and spinoffs, far too many of which are superfluous works created solely because established intellectual properties are easier to sell to audiences than original ideas.
0 kommentar(er)
