Long Live Sacred Germany!
From start to finish, this period piece delivers old-fashioned drama. You are instantly transported to the 1940s as the treacherous blood-oath of allegiance to the Fuhrer echoes throughout the theater an archaic reminder of the zeal of the Nazis to fight and die for their psychotic master. Immediately thereafter is a more somber tone, no rhetoric, as we hear the thoughts of Colonel Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, played by the dynamic Tom Cruise. Cruise begins the sequence in impeccable German as he outlines his issues with the war and how the Holocaust must be ended if there is to be any hope for Germany’s future. The voice slowly changes to English with Cruise’s American accent, and at first I thought, uh oh, this is going to suck.
Yet, director Bryan Singer was wise to eliminate any attempt at false accents in the film. If done poorly, the whole movie would have suffered, so he let each actor speak in their own English, even Carice van Houten kept her original Dutch accent while aptly portraying Stauffenberg’s wife. Some critics will no doubt blast that decision for its lack of purity, but I disagree, it wasn’t like watching Keanu Reeves as a Nazi, with a surfer dude accent the whole movie – now that would have been torture! It added a reality factor to the characters and really you will forget about the accents about 10 minutes into the film, because the acting is tremendous.
The best thing about this film is the designed lack of special effects, it was pure and real. I couldn’t detect a hint of CGI, this film could have easily been shot in the 1940s and it wouldn’t have suffered. A far cry from the typical Singer works, it is almost like Singer is saying, see, I could have run with the big dogs like Capra. He won’t get an argument from me. There were times though when characters weren’t developed enough, for example, Kenneth Branagh as Major-General Henning von Tresckow. It seemed like Brannagh was only available to shoot for a day or two – which is quite possible given his charter, but I wanted to know a lot more about this general.
The precise attention to detail for the uniforms and paint jobs on the planes, tanks, just about everything was stellar and commendable. I will be looking out for more from the military costume supervisor, David Crossman. He really fine-tuned the scenery with razor sharp efficiency. For instance, I didn’t even know that German uniforms had special grooves stitched in to accommodate salad bars (or to a civilian, the ribbons on a uniform). At times I was even distracted counting the stitch lines in the different officer’s cloaks.
One thing American audiences will find troublesome, the pace was slow, but unlike The Good Shepherd, it was edited well and was easy to follow, so history buffs will definitely enjoy this film. If you ever wondered if all Germans were Nazis, this film answers that question; No. Being an American of German descent, I honor what these incredibly brave men struggled to achieve, they tried to rid the world of the most despicable tyrant and mass-murderer in modern times. They were trying to save Germany from the bunkers of time, to show the world that not everyone swore true allegiance to their blood-oaths – that some stood up against madness and hypocrisy. This is a film about true courage and true cowardice, a film about making choices for the greater good for your children to avoid the shame of their fore-fathers.
Genesis 18:23-32
23 Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? 24 What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? 25 Far be it from you to do such a thing to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
