![]() ![]() Vicky Krieps plays Simone Strasser, an Alsatian translator whose brother is aboard U-612. ![]() While U-612 zigs and zags around the Atlantic on a secret and highly improbable mission, the real star of the series scurries around La Rochelle. Once again there’s a noble captain (Rick Okon in the Jurgen Prochnow role) stuck with a zealous Nazi (August Wittgenstein) as first officer. The result is an odd hybrid: The maritime section of the story follows a different boat, U-612, that somehow keeps having misadventures - a strafing, a fall to the sea floor - that closely mirror those of U-96. The eight-episode first season, drawn again from Lothar Gunther-Buchheim’s 1973 novel “Das Boot” and also from a later book of his, “Die Festung,” was originally announced as a remake of the film but then repositioned as a sequel. On the evidence of this handsomely produced show, though, the main benefit of opening up the story is gaining access to a whole new set of World War II cliches. Granted, you’d have to be pretty fearless to set eight hours of TV aboard a submarine, in the manner of Wolfgang Petersen’s film, which took place almost entirely within the confines of the ill-fated U-96. This German-British production, released Monday on Hulu, is a surf-and-turf proposition: Half the action takes place aboard another cramped U-boat while half takes place ashore, among the Nazi occupiers and French collaborators and resisters of La Rochelle, France, where the boats are based. This may be a sepia-tinted thought bubble, but somehow it’s odd that she should be the best thing in a testosteroney drama about blowing up convoys.Fans of the emblematic submarine adventure “Das Boot,” an international hit in 1981, may be alarmed by descriptions of the new “Das Boot” television series. With the look of a startled fawn she slides elegantly between German and French. On the plus side there’s Vicky Krieps, who was so ineffable in the film Phantom Thread, as Simone Strasser, a wartime translator from Alsace caught on the horns of a dilemma. The USP of Das Boot 2.0 is that the underwater drama has to budge up to make room for landlubberly intrigue involving the resistance. ![]() Several still are, and in the first episode at least one of the two instances of female nudity – a landlady giving herself a body wash – felt exploitative. What it means in practice is that not all the female characters are prostitutes with two lines of dialogue, as they mostly were in the film. This sounds like a far-fetched category error. So this new version is hailing itself as a U-boat drama for the #MeToo generation. Pity poor old Rainer Bock, back in costume having played an almost identical Nazi apparatchik in BBC One’s SS-GB.Īnother tour of duty for the Das Boot franchise could be said to lack the merit of urgency. You have to feel for a generation of German actors who, after Downfall, thought they’d moulted the uniform of the SS and the Gestapo. Hoffmann’s particular nemesis is his immediate underling, First Watch Officer Tennstedt (August Wittgenstein), a prig with quivering nostrils who looks as if he last smiled in 1933. Some of those attitudes prevail in the new ship commanded by rookie captain Hoffmann (Rick Okon) as they burrow out into the Atlantic, but national politics play second fiddle to the simmering tensions among men cooped up in a metal tube with only one khazi. It sidestepped the issue of war guilt by ensuring the brave and hardened crew were no fans of Hitler. ![]() That thought has not occurred to the producers of Das Boot (Sky Atlantic), who have exhumed the world of German submariners explored in Wolfgang Petersen’s acclaimed 1981 film, later fattened up as a television drama, and turned it into a sequel.ĭas Boot was German cinema’s first major portrait of the war effort. When someone at BBC News at Six accidentally spliced footage of Spitfires onto a recent story about Prime Minister Theresa May going to Brussels, it occurred to me that a moratorium on the Second World War is overdue. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |