Eviljomr

I'm typically not a big fan of Wolfgang Petersen's films, but I like Das Boot a lot. Very harrowing, tough, uncompromising war film, not Hollywood-like at all. It doesn't feel like there's any guarantee that anyone will survive. I don't think the film would work at all remade as a slick CGI-fest, like Petersen makes these days. Despite the near four hour length of the director's cut, the film never drags, and sets up a relentless pace and a very uncomfortable, queasy feeling right from the start. I thought the camerawork by frequent Paul Verhoeven DP Jost Vacano was good, as were all of the performances, and the score by Klaus Doldinger. I don't think it's possible to make naval war look less fun than Das Boot does.

I was really surprised at how much I ended up liking this movie, I watched it recently, and my mindset going into it was was "well, it'll be well-photographed and have the usual interesting Kubrick thematics, but it'll probably feel kinda long, and you probably won't have a big urge to rewatch it anytime soon, sort of like Eyes Wide Shut". Thankfully, I was wrong, I wouldn't call the 18th century costume drama my favorite type of film, but I found this one to be very absorbing. Even though it's a bit over three hours long, it never feels "slow" or "boring", there's a lot that goes on in it. Like all Kubrick films, there's a lot of different layers to it, and you probably have to watch it more than once to get everything out of it. The famous duel scene toward the end of the film is one of the best I've ever seen, right up there with the climax of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (even though they couldn't be much more different). The more ominous "duel version" of the film's main theme that starts before the actual duel and goes on for what feels like about 20 minutes (I didn't time it) works almost like the audio equivalent of Chinese water torture and helps to bring the tension to a nearly unbearable level. A great film, worth the investment of three hours.

For me, Paul Verhoeven is a somewhat hit-and-miss director, he can make a good film when not saddled with a hack writer like Joe Eszterhas, but I would have to put this film into the "miss" category. While not an all-out debacle like Showgirls, he's done better work. The transformation scenes are pretty cool, I think this may be one of those movies that has one or two really cool scenes that you wish belonged to a better movie. The concept of the movie is a somewhat interesting one, but the script is too full of holes for it to work. The science fiction aspect of the movie is pretty flimsy, and it has none of the element of satire that made Robocop and Starship Troopers work. It degenerates into a bad slasher movie/Alien clone in the second half. I never knew cutting-edge researchers could be such idiots! "He's our good friend! He certainly wouldn't take advantage of his invisibility to conduct a phantom reign of invisible terror! Not remotely possible!" I don't see why Ed Neumeier couldn't have been brought in for the script, I was really hoping for a "ED-209 moment" (a scene where a new weapon/piece of technology malfunctions and kills someone gruesomely) in this movie, but was disappointed. Jerry Goldsmith's score is rather forgettable, he's another person involved with the film who's done much better work. Better luck next time Paul.