It's not like this story concept doesn't deserve to be translated to the screen as a sprawling epic, because it is pretty meaty and promising, yet not as immense as Wolfgang Petersen apparently thinks it is, being just sensitive enough to run the risk of easily falling short if mishandled, and considering that the final product is overlong, with an uneven pacing and a few other errors, it should go without saying that this story concept's potential is not as fulfilled as they say.
As you can imagine, the 293-minute uncut version that I saw, while quite good, really struggles like a trapped animal to pad things out, but it would appear as though no version of this film is without a whole lot of fat too trim, getting to be a bit excessive with its material (I understand that these U-boat battles featured many a long period of suspense, but come on, guys, we got the point within the first two minutes of these, like, ten or fifteen-minute-long sequences of pure waiting), and even more excessive with, of all things, filler, which is needed to flesh out calm, color and characterization within this gritty thriller, but gets to be quite disengagingly repetitious, as it is just so excessive, as well as reflective of this project's more natural shortcomings.
Now, the film rarely, if ever slows down so much that your investment is dislodged, leaving the film to, at least for a moment, slip into underwhelmingness, but things do indeed slow down more often than they should, and such an event grows more and more recurring as things progress, creating something of an inconsistent pacing that disengages, and makes this film's being oh so very overlong near-impossible to ignore. The earlier acts of the film move a bit too steadily, but make up for slowness with a reasonable degree of liveliness and color in order to flesh the story out, but after a while, when all of the fun and games tone down a bit, the film really starts to drag, never to where it's boring, but to where it takes on some relatively dull spells that mark particular heights in the blandness that loom over to many places during the film's body. There's enough humanity in characterization for you to buy into our leads as more than just types, and it's not like genericism taints any other aspect of this story, but you'd be hard pressed to not recognize more than a few of the lead characters more than you should, as they are, in too many places, conventionally built, reflecting a moderate degree of laziness that does damage to the final product's kick, though most decidedly not as much as pacing limpness. That being said, this film still isn't quite as upstanding as they say, being a quite smooth ride and all, but one that hardly sails on without taking some damage.Ĭertainly, this extensively meditative character drama is a generally genuine one that has enough inspiration behind it to be taken seriously, and yet, with that said, the final product takes some very surprising, often offputting lapses in seriousness by turning in quite a bit of comic relief, much of which is kind of cheesy and falls flat as detrimental to tonal evenness and, by extension, the film's momentum as a character piece, which is hurt enough by conventionalism within the writing of our characters.
Dasboot running time how to#
Still, it's not like you're likely to fall out of this film, no matter how long it may be, because this rewarding opus sure does know how to keep you going. Yeah, I watched the uncut version of this film, don't judge me, because it was good, but after seeing that, as well as the director's cut, I think it's safe to say ich habe mehr als genug Deutsch für eine Weile hatte. No, that's just an ignorant American joke, and the Germans have a cool language, as well as some good films, such as this one, which better be good if it's going to keep me going for two-and-a-half hours with its theatrical cut, three-and-a-half hours with its director's cut and, of course, almost five hours with its uncut. This film sounds cheesy enough as it is, what with it's being about, I don't know, a bunch of Germans hanging out in a giant boot that is adrift at sea or something to that effect.
Hey, it's either that or, "We all live in a German submarine, German submarine, German submarine", or, perhaps even, well, no lame song reference at all. "- Rock das boot! - don't rock das boot, baby - Rock das boot! -, don't tip das boot over - Rock das boot! -, don't rock das boot, fräulein!".
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