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U-571 - Collector's Edition

U-571 - Collector's Edition

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Good action, but FAKE
Review: The movie is fake and unrealistic. Sub's couldn't fire underwater at each other. Firing a few Torpedo's at the front BOW of a destoryer is the hardest shot to make, and unlikely to be made by these goofballs. They also couldn't just jump in a German submarine and know how to use it just like that. What a insult to German U-Boat veterans. German's are the best Submariners in the world. By 1943 the German's didn't really have any Destroyers left, there navy was pretty much destroyed besides the hundreds of U-boats. This could have been a great realistic WW2 movie but blew it because of "Hollyweird". About as lame as the new "Pearl Harbor" movie.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good WWII flick.
Review: Great movie. Well thought out plot. A lot of people complain about the fact that the movie portrays a US submarine crew capturing the enigma when it was actually the British that first captured it. A lot of people have put this movie down as a result. Let me point out something. The movie was fictional and dedicated to the memory of those that fought in submarines during WWII. Also, at the end of the movie the makers of the movie DO GIVE CREDIT to the British. If you read the sequence at the end of the movie it lists two HMS submarines as having first captured the enigma. HMS - HER MAJESTY's SERVICE. That's Britain, guys.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Absolute rubbish!
Review: This film is boring,factually inaccurate and complete rubbish!If you want a good underwater adventure,try The hunt for Red October or Crimson tide and avoid this trash at all costs!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The second best Submarine film
Review: I rate this movie highly. I thought the way the film ended was a little stupid, but the movie had enough action to keep just about anyone satisfied. The acting was great and the movie kept up a good pace. I thought the dept charge seqences were filmed extremely well and you got a little of that closed in feeling of being on a actual submarine. The film still cannot hold a candle to " Das Boot " however.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Good fun, could have been better- 3 1/2 stars really.
Review: Okay, let's get the other people's nitpicks out of the way before adding my own:

Yes, the writers should not have had the American heroes capture an Enigma machine, since we all know the British did. They should have named it something else -- or had that part of the mission fail; a good war movie is the getting back alive, you don't have to win the whole war singlehanded. But the Enigma machine is only a McGuffin here, get over it.

Bill Paxton wooden? On the contrary, I thought his performance was the most believable; talk to a real ship captain sometime.

Not "Das Boot?" No, it ain't. But it's not trying to be. It's just trying to be a historical swashbuckler. If we still made twenty war movies a year, it would be more obvious that there are subgenres, from "war is hell" serious movies like "Das Boot" to adventures in a war setting like the "Guns of Navarone" or "U-571."

I didn't notice any screamingly obvious submarine tech errors -- but then, maybe I wouldn't. In a swashbuckler, the credibility level doesn't have to be quite so high, anyway. The two things that kept this movie from getting above 3.5 stars in my book are:

A. Somehow it does fail to get us very involved with the characters. The character writing is skimpy, the acting doesn't grab. Our hero is given one (schematic, all-spelled-out) inner conflict to deal with, and that's all there is to him. Harvey Keitel (whom I always consider overrated, but who occasionally proves me wrong, as here), manages to register his character as a human, but nothing comes of it. T.C. Carson plays his part well, but the way it's written (see B) just hurts the movie. The plot is involving enough to entertain, but it would have been much better with characters we cared about.

B. Okay, I wouldn't nitpick every little technical point, but I hate big fat anachronisms of speech that keep dragging us back to the 1990s or 2000s. Doesn't anybody in Hollywood have an ear for how people spoke in the 1940s? Early on, when our hero calls a stranger "Mack," I thought, okay, they're making an effort. But immediately afterward, there's a macho confrontation ending "If you have a problem, talk to X"--sorry, in the '40s this hadn't yet gotten shortened down from "If you have a problem with that," and even the long version wasn't the most likely way you'd say it. "If you have a beef with me" is only one of a dozen more authentic ways they could have written it, if they'd just gotten their speech into period. It gets worse. I swear I heard someone yell "Incoming" at one point -- Viet Nam, yes, World War II, no. And the cliche "lock and load" as the big finish to a boarding party peptalk! The phrase was "load and lock" during World War II, and it was a practical reminder to people loading M1 Garands, not the Tommy guns used here -- it wasn't an all-purpose American version of "Banzai;" using it that way, as they do here, drags us out of our '40s sub and into some '90s corporate boardroom.

And finally, there are the awful lines given to the black ship's steward, played by T.C. Carson. Now, again, this is just meant to be an audience-pleasing swashbuckler, and no audience wants to wallow in the worst aspects of the old segregated armed forces. We'd all rather see a black steward getting his chance to be a real fighting sailor due to an emergency -- and there's no reason why it couldn't have happened; no doubt it sometimes did. So why ruin it by making it unbelievable? -- by giving the steward, from the earliest scenes of the picture, a free-and-easy '90s outspokenness with the officers that even white enlisted men wouldn't have attempted in those days? It kills the character's credibility, making him as much of a drag, in a way, as a completely subservient steward staying in "his place" all the time would have been.

Sometimes a good plot requires bending the crediblity of technical details -- but you can *always* get the language right, it costs nothing! Watch a few dozen old movies for the slang, read five or six of the scores of good novels written by real '40s submariners, develop an ear. For a writer dealing with '40s characters, these should be the basics, the minimum. Nobody made an effort here. Okay, a lot of the contemporary audience has absolutely no feel for the past, and would consider my nitpicks the pickiest and most pointless of all; I understand, that's why I'd go as high as 3 1/2 stars.
Personally, I think a historical thriller is much more fun if it really feels like the past, and not like a bunch of our immediate contemporaries dressed up in funny clothes.

Anyway, the DVD looks great, sounds great, the story is exciting; don't take it too seriously, and you'll have a good time. But it wouldn't have been hard to make it a lot better.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Weak
Review: The acting in this movie was alright at best. The special effects, well, most of them anyway, were passable. During the sinking of the allied sub, you could tell the actors were in a tank on some studio lot. In fact, the tank didn't even look like it was deep enough. Some of the characters were literraly squatting on the bottom of the tank so it would look like they were drowning.
The story alomost made sense. It was, in fact, the British who originally captured Enigma, not the Americans. And the Brits didn't get the machine off a captured sub, either.
The part that really, really, bugged me about the movie was the ending. (I won't give it away, but for those of you who have seen this movie) it seemed rather lazy to me. I wanted the dierctor to spend a few extra bucks and expand on the ending.
This movie is entertaining enough if you don't have anything better to watch.
For sub movies, however, I still prefer The Hunt For Red October and Crimson Tide.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Well, It was exciting.....
Review: This movie was not that good. I give it 2 1/2 stars. The plot is very incoherent. At one moment, they are ready to leave, the next a sub pops up, and I'm told it was american, but it blows up the other american sub! Then it chases the german sub, which is occupied by the americans, and starts firing at it. The american crew one the german one tries to knock out the torpedoes from the other, but they end ip blowing it to pieces. All through this sequence I was going, what? The plot, as stated above, was incoherent, but the movie was very exciting. I was sad when some people died, although I actually didn't really like the crew.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: great for getting to sleep
Review: I shall keep it short and sweet, like I wish the makers of this movie had kept it. fiction at it's worst, weak acting, modern day producers cannot make war movies, compare this to the likes of 'where eagles dare' and you can see how weak this actually is. I kept Took for ages to get going and when it did (well, sort of ) it was just a rehash of other movies, the hunt for red october was far better I hear they are now making a movie about colditz the infamous german POW camp with as usual american heroes and yet none actually managed to escape from the real thing

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Thomas C. Duensing - red lights
Review: A great movie. I wrote this because of the phrase "fictitious use of red battle lights." I was on a sub for 4 years, our very real "red battle lights" were used to preserve night vision when submerged at night in case we had to emergency surface. (rig for red) The lights were used at PD. (periscope depth) On dark nights even these lights were turned off and you "rigged for black."

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Impossible to select choices on menu
Review: It's impossible to select choices on menu : letters appear but not the cursor to select choices. How is that possible ? (European Zone 2 version)


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