Movie Review: 'U-571'
Pros: Good cast. Nice special effects.
Nifty (if derivative) action tale.
Cons: Not the American "Das
Boot." Some weakly-written scenes. Clichés.
A long time ago, back in the 1970s and when Mom was a loyal
subscriber to Reader's Digest Condensed Books, I read the
abridged version of British novelist Douglas Reeman's His Majesty's
U-Boat, the American edition's title of Go In and Sink!
Because we gave away most of our Condensed Books volumes before our last move and also due to the passage of time, I only have very dim memories of Reeman's novel, which focused on a German U-boat which is captured intact by the Royal Navy and then used against the Axis in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Though purely fictional, Reeman's 1975 novel seems to have been based on several real-life incidents involving British personnel and German submarines, some of which resulted in major intelligence coups for the Allied war effort in the years before America's entry into World War II.
Thus, when I was invited by my former neighbor Rolf Bischof to see U-571 when it was out in theaters in 2000, I figured that Jonathan Mostow's movie was an adaptation of His Majesty's U-Boat, albeit with a less clunky title.
But while U-571 shares some of the overall themes of Reeman's novel, the film is essentially an All-American throwback to the World War II submarine pictures (Destination Tokyo, Run Silent, Run Deep, and Operation Pacific) that came out in the 1940s and 1950s.
Mostow, who later directed Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, cheerfully admits to this in the director's commentary track on the U-571 DVD. It was his intention, he says, to pay tribute to all those World War II sub movies and replicate their sense of derring-do and adventure and not be limited by historical accuracy. (That's not to say that Mostow and crew don't try to capture the flavor of the period or try to get technical details right. The movie does have a 1940s war movie vibe to it and it tries not to be too fantastical, but if you're looking for a Saving Private Ryan under the sea here, you're a Sailor Outta Luck.)
The plot, of course, is fairly simple (so simple, as the old Geico commercial would say, a caveman can figure it out):
It is 1942. Even with the American entry into the war, Nazi submarines are wreaking havoc on Allied shipping in the North Atlantic. The sea lanes between the U.S. and Britain are littered with the hulks of Allied freighters, tankers and even warships.
As the film opens, the German submarine U-571 is cruising in what historians call the Black Pit of the Atlantic: the area where long-range bombers from the U.S. or the British Isles are out of striking range.
The sub's captain (Thomas Kretschmann) makes a successful torpedo attack on a British convoy and sinks a freighter, but one of the escorts spots the U-571 and attacks her with depth charges. Badly damaged, the sub surfaces after the convoy moves on and sends a distress signal to U-boat HQ.
We then cut to a party at a naval base in the U.S. East Coast (more than likely the one in Groton, CT), where a USO dance is being held as part of S-33's two-week liberty.
Everyone seems to be having a great time - except for S-33's XO (executive officer), Lt. Andrew Tyler (Matthew McConaughey). Young but considered by his skipper, Lt. Cmdr. Mike Dahlgren (Bill Paxton) to be a fine first officer, Tyler is unhappy because Dahlgren has not recommended him for command of his own sub.
But soon the entire crew of S-33, one of those old and slow subs left over from the lean days of the 1920s and '30s the Navy is using to stem the Axis tide while newer sub classes are built, will be unhappy when MPs come in and interrupt the dance to tell the "bubbleheads" their shore leave has been cancelled.
Now, if you've seen any of those set-in-World War II suspense/action-adventures along the lines of The Guns of Navarone or Where Eagles Dare, you know where U-571 is heading. The S-33 will be given a bit of a facelift to resemble a German sub, rendezvous with the damaged German boat, send a boarding party to overwhelm its crew and grab an Enigma code machine from its radio room. then sink U-571 before the German rescue sub arrives on station.
My Take: When I first watched U-571 over a decade ago, I was less than impressed, partly because I thought it would have been better to tell the story with a British cast and with British characters rather than Americans as the heroes. And in some ways, I still think the film would have been more truthful had Mostow not taken the easy way out and cast McConaughey, Paxton, Jon Bon Jovi, Harvey Keitel, David Keith and Matthew Settle as the Yanks Who Win the Battle of the Atlantic All By Themselves.
Perhaps if Mostow had been trying to make the next Das Boot or The Hunt for Red October all these "but it didn't happen this way" quibbles would still nag at me.
However, I'm savvy enough to realize that Mostow is an American filmmaker making a movie for an American audience, most of whose members aren't well-versed on World War II history and simply want to be entertained for two hours.
And watched with the "Okay, this is just for fun and not to learn about real submarine warfare during World War II" attitude, U-571 does work as a sometimes thrilling Guns of Navarone-Lite actioner.
Yes, it’s full of clichés and standard-issue interchangeable characters. We have the familiar stern-CO-versus-resentful-XO subplot lifted from Robert Wise's Run Silent, Run Deep, the grizzled-but-wise Chief of the Boat (or COB) who dispenses Navy wisdom to the young wannabe skipper, the-green-and-scared sailors who must "man up" to face the Nazis, as well as the loyal-to-Hitler Nazi U-boat skipper who shoots helpless Allied sailors and then causes havoc aboard the now-captured U-571.
There are also, unfortunately, a couple of totally unnecessary scenes that still annoy me even when I willfully ignore the film's lack of historical truthfulness. The worst one of these involves a panicky lookout who, when a German recce plane looks the U-571 over, tells one of the gunners to shoot it down even though it would be more prudent to simply "act German" and not do anything to arouse suspicion.
Now, there have been way too many war movies where American enlisted men or junior officers are insubordinate to superiors and behave unprofessionally in combat situations, and this is one of those scenes.
What Mostow intended to do here, I am not sure. Perhaps he wants to show that Tyler has matured as a Navy officer and is showing that he's just as stern as his skipper. Whatever. It just looks like Mostow didn't do his homework re the behavior of U.S. Navy personnel in a combat situation and makes his sailors look churlish and unprofessional.
For all that, U-571 is not a terrible, unwatchable mess. It achieves various of its goals by giving viewers a crew they can cheer for, villains they can boo, and some exciting action sequences to marvel at.
Because we gave away most of our Condensed Books volumes before our last move and also due to the passage of time, I only have very dim memories of Reeman's novel, which focused on a German U-boat which is captured intact by the Royal Navy and then used against the Axis in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Though purely fictional, Reeman's 1975 novel seems to have been based on several real-life incidents involving British personnel and German submarines, some of which resulted in major intelligence coups for the Allied war effort in the years before America's entry into World War II.
Thus, when I was invited by my former neighbor Rolf Bischof to see U-571 when it was out in theaters in 2000, I figured that Jonathan Mostow's movie was an adaptation of His Majesty's U-Boat, albeit with a less clunky title.
But while U-571 shares some of the overall themes of Reeman's novel, the film is essentially an All-American throwback to the World War II submarine pictures (Destination Tokyo, Run Silent, Run Deep, and Operation Pacific) that came out in the 1940s and 1950s.
Mostow, who later directed Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, cheerfully admits to this in the director's commentary track on the U-571 DVD. It was his intention, he says, to pay tribute to all those World War II sub movies and replicate their sense of derring-do and adventure and not be limited by historical accuracy. (That's not to say that Mostow and crew don't try to capture the flavor of the period or try to get technical details right. The movie does have a 1940s war movie vibe to it and it tries not to be too fantastical, but if you're looking for a Saving Private Ryan under the sea here, you're a Sailor Outta Luck.)
The plot, of course, is fairly simple (so simple, as the old Geico commercial would say, a caveman can figure it out):
It is 1942. Even with the American entry into the war, Nazi submarines are wreaking havoc on Allied shipping in the North Atlantic. The sea lanes between the U.S. and Britain are littered with the hulks of Allied freighters, tankers and even warships.
As the film opens, the German submarine U-571 is cruising in what historians call the Black Pit of the Atlantic: the area where long-range bombers from the U.S. or the British Isles are out of striking range.
The sub's captain (Thomas Kretschmann) makes a successful torpedo attack on a British convoy and sinks a freighter, but one of the escorts spots the U-571 and attacks her with depth charges. Badly damaged, the sub surfaces after the convoy moves on and sends a distress signal to U-boat HQ.
We then cut to a party at a naval base in the U.S. East Coast (more than likely the one in Groton, CT), where a USO dance is being held as part of S-33's two-week liberty.
Everyone seems to be having a great time - except for S-33's XO (executive officer), Lt. Andrew Tyler (Matthew McConaughey). Young but considered by his skipper, Lt. Cmdr. Mike Dahlgren (Bill Paxton) to be a fine first officer, Tyler is unhappy because Dahlgren has not recommended him for command of his own sub.
But soon the entire crew of S-33, one of those old and slow subs left over from the lean days of the 1920s and '30s the Navy is using to stem the Axis tide while newer sub classes are built, will be unhappy when MPs come in and interrupt the dance to tell the "bubbleheads" their shore leave has been cancelled.
Now, if you've seen any of those set-in-World War II suspense/action-adventures along the lines of The Guns of Navarone or Where Eagles Dare, you know where U-571 is heading. The S-33 will be given a bit of a facelift to resemble a German sub, rendezvous with the damaged German boat, send a boarding party to overwhelm its crew and grab an Enigma code machine from its radio room. then sink U-571 before the German rescue sub arrives on station.
My Take: When I first watched U-571 over a decade ago, I was less than impressed, partly because I thought it would have been better to tell the story with a British cast and with British characters rather than Americans as the heroes. And in some ways, I still think the film would have been more truthful had Mostow not taken the easy way out and cast McConaughey, Paxton, Jon Bon Jovi, Harvey Keitel, David Keith and Matthew Settle as the Yanks Who Win the Battle of the Atlantic All By Themselves.
Perhaps if Mostow had been trying to make the next Das Boot or The Hunt for Red October all these "but it didn't happen this way" quibbles would still nag at me.
However, I'm savvy enough to realize that Mostow is an American filmmaker making a movie for an American audience, most of whose members aren't well-versed on World War II history and simply want to be entertained for two hours.
And watched with the "Okay, this is just for fun and not to learn about real submarine warfare during World War II" attitude, U-571 does work as a sometimes thrilling Guns of Navarone-Lite actioner.
Yes, it’s full of clichés and standard-issue interchangeable characters. We have the familiar stern-CO-versus-resentful-XO subplot lifted from Robert Wise's Run Silent, Run Deep, the grizzled-but-wise Chief of the Boat (or COB) who dispenses Navy wisdom to the young wannabe skipper, the-green-and-scared sailors who must "man up" to face the Nazis, as well as the loyal-to-Hitler Nazi U-boat skipper who shoots helpless Allied sailors and then causes havoc aboard the now-captured U-571.
There are also, unfortunately, a couple of totally unnecessary scenes that still annoy me even when I willfully ignore the film's lack of historical truthfulness. The worst one of these involves a panicky lookout who, when a German recce plane looks the U-571 over, tells one of the gunners to shoot it down even though it would be more prudent to simply "act German" and not do anything to arouse suspicion.
Now, there have been way too many war movies where American enlisted men or junior officers are insubordinate to superiors and behave unprofessionally in combat situations, and this is one of those scenes.
What Mostow intended to do here, I am not sure. Perhaps he wants to show that Tyler has matured as a Navy officer and is showing that he's just as stern as his skipper. Whatever. It just looks like Mostow didn't do his homework re the behavior of U.S. Navy personnel in a combat situation and makes his sailors look churlish and unprofessional.
For all that, U-571 is not a terrible, unwatchable mess. It achieves various of its goals by giving viewers a crew they can cheer for, villains they can boo, and some exciting action sequences to marvel at.
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