Das boot torrent
Food hangs everywhere, sailors share bunks, hammocks, and each other’s stench, and the wardroom for officers is merely an alcove, which anyone passing must disrupt. Petersen presents fallible people, not stereotypes: they pick their noses, fart, and retell stale sexual fantasies. Just as the men themselves slowly grow to know each other, through shared photographs and the sharing of fragmentary gossip, so too does the audience grow to know them, if not necessarily like them. As he did in the earlier director’s cut of the film, Petersen fleshes out both characters and the effects of the apparently unending tedium of submarine operations. The word “routine” is key to the whole experience of this extended version of the film, and to the daring of Petersen’s generic exploration. Das Boot charts the testing of captain, crew and correspondent as the Old Man’s submarine completes one routine Atlantic patrol. As one final burden, a young naval journalist, Lieutenant Werner (Herbert Grönemeyer) has joined the crew to report on the submarine’s victories at sea. Instead of comrades in arms, the navy has sent him mere boys, untrained and untested, for whom he can barely contain his contempt. In the film’s present, Der Alte claims, on the eve of his submarine’s departure, almost all the great U-Boat captains are dead, and the only survivor beside himself is a hopeless drunk, wholly unfit for service. Then, roving “wolf packs” of submarines threatened to cut Britain off from its supply of food and armaments. Although only hindsight allows contemporary viewers to see that invasion as the fatal mistake that precipitated the total destruction of the Third Reich, the captain of the submarine, nicknamed the “Der Alte” (the Old Man), and played with fierce concentration by Jürgen Prochnow, is already bitterly nostalgic for the submariners’ glory days of 19. The film is set in the last months of 1941, after Hitler’s hubris had launched a massive invasion against Germany’s erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, and the German dictator truly seemed master of Europe.
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In Das Boot, he executes the conventions of the war movie superbly, using visual imagination and directorial discipline to take risks with length, inaction and with complex characters whom he is not afraid to show in their less likable moments. Petersen is fascinated by genre film, and he pushes the expectations of genre without breaching the compact with the audience that the “war film,” “thriller,” and “epic” implies. Far more clearly than any other, this version confirms both his unique talent as a filmmaker and the limitations within which he chooses to work. The DVD release of the 293-minute mini-series version of Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot is a landmark event for connoisseurs of war movies, thrill-seekers, and lovers of consummate filmmaking.