When Wolfgang Petersen passed away earlier this August, a certain kind of action film went away with him. In an age where action films drip with self-awareness and irony, when the mere appearance of Ryan Reynolds signals you should not take them seriously, Petersen’s approach to the genre is out of fashion. Most of his films were sincere and ridiculous, often in the same moment, leading to a kind of melodrama where the audience had no choice but to get emotionally involved. In Air Force One, arguably Petersen’s greatest success, Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman chew through the scenery in an absurd hijacking premise, and yet it is convincing (in the moment, anyway) because they never once act like they know they are in a movie. Action audiences nowadays are taught to be jaded, to react only to the most daring physical feats, and Petersen was always more traditional than that. He got us to care about the characters first.
That focus on character is important to Das Boot, Petersen’s World War II submarine thriller, which is ironic because they are all Nazis. Has there ever been a successful war film in the United States that so resolutely focused on the enemy’s point of view? In adapting the novel by Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Petersen sidesteps around the political realities of the situation. Jürgen Prochnow plays the Captain, a weary veteran who has a low opinion of the Nazi high command. Indeed, the characters barely mention Hitler, and all the swastikas are discreetly hidden in their uniforms. Only the first watch officer (Hubertus Bengsch) is a true believer, and most of the crewmates treat him with mild annoyance and thinly-veiled contempt. But we come to care about the characters, anyway, not just because they talk fondly about their girlfriends and wives back home. It is because, through Petersen’s direction, life on a submarine is hell on earth.
We would not feel the raw power of Das Boot without Petersen’s cinematographer Jost Vacano. He created a camera especially for the film, one that allows an operator to careen from one end of the ship to another. Sometimes the camera moves so quickly, in movements so deft, that it seems to have a mind of its own. Through this movement, we get a sense of the confined quarters, which is how Petersen can evoke the hellish conditions. Most modern submarine films allow plenty of space for everyone to move around, whereas the crew in Das Boot are practically all on top of one another. The officers’ quarters are the size of a large closet, for example, and they have to stand up when anyone needs to pass through. Instead of a sophisticated vessel teeming with impressive technology, the U-Boat is like the belly of a great engine, one that thrums with life and has seemingly no interest in keeping its inhabitants comfortable.
Despite the constant claustrophobia, the crew are successful in their pursuit of English vessels. They stalk the waters of the Northern Atlantic carefully, looking for the right opportunity to strike, out of a need to be useful and to stave off boredom (the director’s cut of the film is about three and a half hours long, and includes long sections to suggest ennui among the men). The crew eventually sinks an English boat, which leads to what might be the most disturbing section of the film. After the U-boat resurfaces, the Captain and the others watch as the surviving Englishmen drown. It is a pitiful sight: they jump from the ship, begging for their lives, as they swim to the U-boat in a desperate attempt to reach safety. There is a brief debate about whether they should help, then the crew decides they have no option but to leave these men to die. Petersen views this decision in practical terms. What could have the Captain done? Made additional room? Again, the scene does not suggest these men are evil, and instead find themselves in an impossible situation. Das Boot is less about warfare than it is about survival or endurance.
With the immediate aftermath of the English vessel sinking, Das Boot introduces a kind of karmic cruelty that is uncommon to war thrillers. There is a brief scene where the Captain and the officers refuel and spend some time with corrupt, vulgar members of the German navy. They look for some relief–particularly one man who wants to be transferred off the ship–and they are told not to deviate. The subtext is that, alone at the bottom of the sea, the military has no interest in the U-boat operators and they are utterly expendable. That feeling kicks into high gear when the crew ventures toward the Strait of Gibraltar, which is dangerous territory precisely because it is so narrow. They have no choice but to push the ship to its pressurized limits, well below the recommended depth, until rivets fly off the hull like dangerous projectiles. This is the real climax of the film, and it has nothing to do with the enemy. Petersen and his team use practical effects to convey one horrible calamity after another, a kind of mechanical mega-failure that would be a huge influence on the genre for years (in particular, Das Boot is a clear major influence on James Cameron).
But the real karmic cruelty does not come until the crew survives the Gibraltar ordeal. They have returned the U-boat to its dock, having finished a successful mission, and Allied planes bomb the shipyard before they have time to celebrate. The scene is harrowing and complicated because these men, some of whom we identify with despite their chosen side, are killed without much thought or care. The Captain, after guiding his crew through a wringer, watches with resignation as he dies from a shrapnel attack. He perishes at the same time the ship does, a metaphor for how he is seen as cannon fodder. It is important to note Buchheim spent time on a real U-boat before he wrote the book, and it did not share the same fate. U-96 survived until the end of World War II, a conclusion that does not jibe with Petersen’s vision. The ship must be destroyed in order to restore balance, to create a reckoning and a sense of finality, although there is no sense of relief. Instead, through the captain’s weary eyes, we sense the borderline hilarious futility of it all. Through sheer moviemaking craft, the kind that can be truly exhilarating, Das Boot reveals itself to be anti-war.
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