It’s been called a “military movie masterpiece” that “invests heavily in the men” it portrays on screen. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, has a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is widely considered among the greatest war films of all time.
Das Boot is a 1981 German film following the crew of a U-boat as they patrol the Atlantic Ocean. According to the Collider website, who rank it sixth in a list of the best war film endings of all time, when the film opened by detailing the mass casualties such crews suffered over the course of the war, American audiences cheered “emphatically” but “their attitude changed somewhat through the course of the film”.
They add: “Not only does the military movie masterpiece delve into the unbearable claustrophobia and frightful intensity of life in a submarine, it also invests heavily in the men on the crew and the brotherhood they form, not to mention the logistical hardships they are forced to endure.”
Das Boot means “The Boat”, a reference of course to the deadly German submarines, or U-boats, which patrolled the oceans targeting the ships of the Allied forces. The German navy began World War Two with only 56 submarines but built more than 1,000 during the course of the war.
The casualty rate was shocking: of the 40,000 or so men recruited to serve on the U-boats, around 28,000 died. But they were also responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Allied soliders.
Das Boot tells the story from the perspective of the submariners, showing them attacking, and being attacked by, British warships, battered by gales and bombed from the skies by British fighter jets. It ends with the crew returning to La Rochelle, but the British Royal Air Force is above.
The film stars Jürgen Prochnow as the U-boat’s captain and Herbert Grönemeyer as a war correspondent sent out to sea with the crew to report on them in action. It was the breakout film for director Wolfgang Petersen, who went on to direct The Never-Ending Story, In The Line of Fire, Air Force One, The Perfect Storm and Troy.
Critics are united in the excellence of Das Boot, giving it a score of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.4/10 on IMDB. Writing on renowned movie review website Roger Ebert, Wael Khairy says it is a film with “crushing suspense”, adding: “Das Boot is a tense psychological drama with a powerful anti-war message and enough nerve-wracking suspense to make your heart pound against your chest like depth charges rupturing a submarine’s hull.”
He says it is “possibly the most authentic war film ever made”.
Dwight Brown in Sepia praises the acting, saying: “Das Boot’s actors look like they have lived through every sneak attack and painful claustrophobic moment in this film.”
And Judy Stone in the San Francisco Examiner says: “Director Wolfgang Petersen has rigorously discarded war movie clichés, both American and those of the Nazi regime, to show the very human fears and real courage of Germans who battled for, and lost, supremacy of the seas.”
Das Boot is available to strream free with a subscription on Netflix and for rent on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and Sky Store.