U-571 Review by Tim Wick
Ladies beware! This is a GUY movie. Now I'm not saying you won't like it,
but don't think for one moment that the makers of this movie put something
in there for you. This is a movie about a bunch of GUYS doing things that
GUYS do in ways that other GUYS love to think they would do it. This is a
movie about the type of hero every GUY wishes he was and about how every GUY
has a hero inside him if he just has the courage to let it out.
I know that there are a lot of women out there that would not find this a
problem. Hell, I'm one of those GUYS that actually enjoys films
affectionately referred to as "chick flicks". I will readily admit that I
cried during the scene in Return to Me when David Duchovny's wife died.
That was a heart wrenching scene and I'm not going to lie and tell you that
it didn't get to me because I'm a GUY. Of course I tried to hide it from
the people I was at the theatre with - I'm a GUY after all. I'll happily
admit it here to my tiny throng of fans because I know that it makes me look
more sensitive and that could reap benefits later on if my marriage ever
breaks up and I have to start dating again. There will be written proof
that I can be sensitive.
But back to the movie I'm actually reviewing. The point of all this GUY
talk is to let you know that despite being about submarines, this is not a
deep movie. I'm sure if you started digging into the science of submarines
in W.W.II, you would find that almost every "realistic" part of the movie
was little better than artistic fabrication. The makers of this movie don't
care about realism. They care about tension and explosions and a bunch of
GUYS in trouble.
Which is fine. I thought the movie was fun. My best indication of how good
(or bad) a movie was is how much my friends and I talk afterward. If it was
awful, we can't stop talking about it. This follows the theory that it's a
lot more fun to rip on a movie than it is to talk about how good it was. If
it was amazingly good, we heap superlatives on it and start listing all the
friends we will call and tell they must drop what they are doing and go see
this movie now. If it was OK, we tend to talk about it a little and then
go on to other things. This movie fell into the OK category.
I'm of two different minds on this film. When it was in the middle of an
action sequence, it rocked. The depth charge sequences were edited to be
violent and terrifying and they certainly were. The special effects of
ships being blown sunk were truly spectacular. There are whole lists of
superlatives I could choose for those sequences. The direction during such
scenes was very tight. Jonathan Mostow, who also directed Breakdown,
certainly knows how to sustain tension and then pay off with explosive
action.
Where he falls short is in character development. Matthew McConaughey plays
the XO of a US Submarine who has just been denied his own command (you find
this out in the first two minutes, so I'm not spoiling anything). What
follows is obviously the story of what he has to do to become worthy of
command. As a result, none of the other characters are important or
interesting. That was frustrating. I had no time to get to know the
characters so I had no ability to really develop empathy for their situation
or their fates. You never really learned their names because their roles
were so limited that you didn't care to find them out. This was doubly
frustrating because the movie developed the personalities of many of the
German submariners in the first few minutes and then seemed to forget about
character development from then on.
Most W.W.II era movies are "mission movies". You can't show the whole war,
so you show it in microcosm. That is what is happening here. The story of
U-571 is the microcosm of the war for control of the Atlantic. You get the
idea of what sub crews had to do during battle if they wanted to live to get
home. The crew is faceless (even when the chief of the boat is played by
Harvey Keitel), and some are doomed to die in a dramatic and appropriately
heroic fashion. We have been told that everyone in the war was a hero and
movies like U-571 play to that. Movies like Saving Private Ryan that show
characters who are not heroes are gutsy in comparison because we don't want
to see that reality of war. Every GUY out there believes he would be the
one to sacrifice his life to save his crew members, not stand in a stairway
paralyzed while your comrade is slowly killed in the next room.
But I really did enjoy the movie. I won't buy it on DVD and I probably
won't see it again - there are no new layers to appreciate.
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