![]() ![]() And somehow, the crew is forced to make a home amidst her innards to sleep like sardines between piping, potatoes, and pressure gauges.ĭas Boot isn’t a single-location film in the true sense. She groans, splits, careens, and topples. U-96 is a tomb a rusting tin can that rarely has its fleshy cargo’s best interests at heart. Crucially, a driving force in selling the audience on this empathy-charged specificity is the true star of the film: the titular boat. And in knowing more about U-96‘s crew, we can’t help but feel compassion for what they’re going through. We spend hours with these men (nearly five hours, to be exact, if you’re watching the 2004 “Original Uncut Version,” which you should be). They spend their days sweating and festering in a steel trap, fearful of the uncaring pang from the radar system signaling another ship has found them.ĭas Boot’s strength is in its nuance. U-96’s crew oscillates from agonizing boredom to abject terror from overindulgence to gut rot. Comprised of a cast of unknowns - including welders, students, and auto mechanics sourced from across Germany - Das Boot attempts, as best it can, to obliterate any of naval warfare’s propagandistic glamor. Partially green-lit and financed as a miniseries, Das Boot also easily (if unfairly) lays claim to the title of “greatest made-for-tv-movie” of all time. Das Boot was nominated for six Academy Awards, the current record for any German-made film. While a lengthy, expensive, and troubled production frequently threatened to tank Das Boot, the film’s commercial and critical success abroad saved what was a potentially sinking ship. As in Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s 1973 German novel of the same name, these men are not cartoonish, mustache-twirling Nazis but ordinary, humanized twenty-somethings caught in the gears of a war machine that could care less if they died at sea. ![]() Directed by the late Wolfgang Petersen and originally released in the fall of 1981, Das Boot follows the German submarine U-96 and its crew of inexperienced mariners as they fight in a war whose victory is very nearly decided. With nary a reanimated corpse or vengeful spirit to be found, some of the most harrowing, butt-clenching cinematic frights come courtesy of anti-war films. Many anti-war films feel like horror movies. This entry explains how the filmmakers behind 1981’s ‘Das Boot’ created the impression of a working submarine. Welcome to How’d They Do That? - a monthly column that unpacks moments of movie magic and celebrates the technical wizards who pulled them off. ![]()
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