Das Boot

Das Boot (1981) covers a German submarine's patrol in the Atlantic in 1941. U-96 leaves France. The crew are mostly very young; the captain does not believe the war can be won and mocks the propaganda openly. Most of the film is waiting. Nothing happens for weeks: eating, sleeping, foul air, narrow corridors. Then a convoy is found and the attack lasts a few minutes. Then the depth charges begin and go on for hours. Those sections are the centre. The boat goes deep, the hull cracks under pressure, rivets fire out like bullets, and nobody can do anything. War here is not a battle but a wait. It was shot in sequence over a year. The reason: so that the actors' beards and hair genuinely grew, their skin genuinely paled, and the exhaustion was real. Petersen told them not to go out in the sun all summer, so as not to spoil the sickly pallor that came from months inside a metal tube. Two full sized submarines were built: one that floated at sea and one for interiors. The plans were found at a museum in Chicago and the original builder was commissioned to make them. One of those models was used the same year in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It received six Oscar nominations, a number not previously seen for a foreign language film. Several versions exist; the longest runs past five hours. The cinema version runs 149 minutes. Good for: war films, siege tension, and technical realism. Less good for: it is very hard for anyone claustrophobic and the pace is deliberately slow.