Downfall

Downfall is largely based on Traudl Junge's experience as Adolph Hitler's personal secretary.  She was in the Berlin bunker within which Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide, left pretty much right after that.

There is a great satisfaction to watch the dicks of the The Third Reich squirm as bombs splash one after another thirty feet over their heads.  At times, the melodrama reaches a surreal crescendo, and I almost feel like the filmmaker is trying to inspire a level of empathy for the characters (Hitler and Goebbels, a butt-load of Generals with curly white mustaches, and SS dudes), I personally find no love in my heart for Nazis, and, regardless of how doe-eyed they are, the wartime German civilians have to be really charming to gain any sort of warm vibe from my direction.




Anyway, like any Y-chromo, I do love seeing things explode.  But, Downfall especially comes through on showing the utter  break down of civil society with a kind of "hold-your-ankles-and-kiss-your-ass-good-bye" sort of flare.  We see the buildings blow up and then we see what happens because the buildings blow up.  Nothing drives the pacifist's point home stronger than roving gangs of leaderless soldiers shooting their own country's civilians who had the good fortune to escape the falling bombs but the bad luck to stumble upon Nazis while they were hiding.


One of the main reasons that I watched Downfall was because of the Hitler meme -- you don't know it?  here it is:


original



enhanced






Funny?  Maybe, I have a hard time sitting through youtubes that are longer than, say, one or two minutes, but Hitler's rant in a bunker piqued my interest infinitely more.

Final word on this flick is that it is fascinating, if a tad long (run time was at about 2 and half hours).  Aside from some musical swells and a particularly conspicuous cut to the interview with the real Traudl Junge from 2001 -- both are elements that tried to inject some humanity into the characters, which I feel, even 70 years later is disrespectful to those that were effected by the war and the Nazis exterminatory side projects -- the movie is unapologetic towards the ethos of National Socialism and quite effective in its display of the madness of many of the major players of the Nazi society that ended up in that bunker (Goebbels and family, Rommel, Hitler and Braun).

The movie is the 80th highest-rated of all time on IMDb, which might be a little bit of over-achievement, but I can't fault anyone who believes this to be at the very least a quality way to spend an evening, and at the very most an important film that should be viewed and reviewed for generations.



below: notes I took while watching --



I am surprised to find that Downfall is #80 on the all-time imdb list.


Being on a battle front seems unreal enough to me, but imagine if you were at home and you could hear the battle front move closer and closer to you (like a thunder storm) and then ended up right above your head.


That's sort of the nice thing about being an American -- and I suspect the reason that most of the world get irked by American society -- is that we rarely end up at a battle front.  It's the reason that we're fat and lazy and whiny. 


this movie is claustrophobic.  Seems like a lot of movies these days are about everything going to shit.  Like, everything is sucky-to-the-point that squadrons of soldiers are roaming the streets of Berlin, killing civilians.   There's a scene in Berlin as the Russians are bombing the hell out of it.  a squadron of German soldiers that is roaming through the city finds a couple of old men -- civilians hiding in a swiss cheese buidling.  The squadron leader shoots them point blank. 


i've discovered something about myself by watching this movie, usually war movies make me swell with so much respect for the soldiers.  I could never ever do in a million years what they do . . . that being said -- Nazis totally suck in all ways.