Tom Cruise: Valkyrie

I too watched it t'other day without seeing any reviews and found it entertaining and never gave thought to accents once the German dialect changed into English.

It's a story I had no knowledge of or even considered, so it was a job well done for me and held my interest from start to finish.

It's like all those Roman films with british/american accents, just go with it. I Claudius anyone?

I'm very interested in this, so must get it on rental.... in my final year at school (quite a long time ago) I wrote a dissertation about the German resistance movements to Nazism, centring on the Generals' plot, which came the closest to actually achieving anything.

After reading most of the available historical literature about them in English, my conclusion was that for the most part the Generals' plot was a collection of disgruntled peeved-offs annoyed at having missed promotion or having felt slighted by Hitler at some time, and hopeless romantics who felt it was more important to make a gesture than to actually succeed in overthrowing the Nazis - it was more a question of showing the world that at least some Germans had at least tried to do something. For this reason they failed to make adequate plans to take over power following the attempted assasination - they did not expect to succeed. The lacked ruthlessness - althought they were fully prepared to pay for failure with their own (and their families) lives. Stauffenberg himself seems to have been the only really dynamic and driven member of the conspiracy.

Anyway.... William Shirer's "Inside the Third Reich" gives a very good overview of internal opposition to Nazism and its context, and is a very good read too.

quote:

Stauffenberg himself seems to have been the only really dynamic and driven member of the conspiracy.

And to be fair, that is the line taken in the film. We watched it last weekend and it certainly exceeded my admittedly low expectations. Any film like this ineveitably lacks real tension, since we know the outcome, but I thought it was well done though hardly up to the standard of "The Usual Suspects" an earlier Bryan Singer film.

I thought it was a nice change of pace from some other Nazi movies I have seen. But although I got past Tom's amairukin accent I still couldnt stop looking at his f-ing curly hair. The picture in my mind of him in hair curlers and a makeup robe made it impossible to take the film seriously I liked inglorious basterds better! I liked Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder much better.

best bit for me was when he got shot unfortunately had to wait till near the end.

There is a big problem with films about Nazis for me in that for any film to be watchable the main characters have to made out to be at times warm and normal human beings who happened to be little deviant in their behaviour in a few moments of weakness.

How one must wish that this actaully had been the case, but the extreme of evil actually commited by the whole Nazi machine, if not the whole German people it should be added, makes it impossible for me to take such a film serious from the very start.

As my Norwegian grandfather noted of the pathetic attempt by Stauffenburg to kill Hitler, then had he really been determined to be successful he would have stood next Hitler with the bomb between him and his leader at the time when it was supposed to go off, thus guaranteeing certain death for both Hitler and himself.

A small price to pay for the destruction of such a man as Hitler one might conclude, and having concluded it one can no longer take the whole story as being that significant in the first place.

More interesting [and psychologically a fascinating glimse indeed] was last years broadcast on the BBC of the multi-part documentary World War Two Behing Closed Doors, where the complex traingular relationship between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill was probed during almost the whole period of WW2, from the early neutrality of the US, and intial Alliance of the Russians with Hitler [Ribentrop - Molotov Pact abrogated by the Germans when they attacked Russia], and the initial position where the only major unconquered military power in the World left fighting the Nazis was the UK.

Our first Alliance was with Poland, and the interesting one was the second [in terms of the French coming to the aid of Poles and declaring war on the Nazis] was the French. I suspect that Churchill would have prefered a very different outcome for the Poles, who certainly must have watched in amazement as Paris was liberated, while Warsaw was dynamited block by bloke as the Nazis retreated, watched by the Russian Army sitting east of the Vistula in Praga [an eastern suburb of Warsaw], but by this stage Stalin and Roosevelt had carved things up without any wish to allow CXhurchill's view any signiicance at all.

This is real history, and puts almost all films about Nazis into perpective.

ATB from George

bloody hell george thats a bit deep innit ?
were only talking films here.

Dear Scotty,

Serious topic [to make a film about] and so a serious repsonse from me.

Now if it had been a fairy tale or science fiction ...

ATB from George

George, so why choose tom thumb to play a serious role on a serious subject in a serious film ? doesnt add up to me. regards, Dave

It does not add up for me either given the serious subject matter and requirement for honest historical objectivity as the living witnesses are no longer there to counter the erosion of real history.

Hollywood is not noted for its interest in historical accuracy, and unfortunately some people get all the history they know from such sources.

Someone has occasionally to draw a line on this and sometimes [several times in the last decade] Hollywood has come not just close to rewriting history for a good dramatic effect. This needs to be noted and brought out, and shown for what it is.

History itself was more significant than anything that came out of Hollywood. Yet people still believe the nonesense that comes out of Hollywood represents fact. I wish Hollywood would stick to fairy stories.

Some people forget some of the facts in my first post - such as which side the Rusiians were on in 1939, and about the neutrality of the US till Pearl Harbour was bombed. With the 70th Anniversaries of these things all in the pipeline it is as well to be armed with some knowledge before we accept the whole sale re-writing of history - always a risk when enough people are ill-informed or un-informed.

That is why I believe it is crucial to stand up for facts - sometimes uncomfortable facts, even when they pertain to the actions of ourselves.

ATB from George

yeah, asking Hollywood for accuracy is like asking an Opera to be accurate, it's all for entertainment. Just heard there's a Hamlet opera where Hamlet lives at the end, can't kill off the main character for dramatic reasons? Oh please. That's even rewriting fiction.

Better accuracy with documentaries which I happen to like, but that also depends on the film maker and his/her bias and sources. I'm sure a Japanese filmmaker will have a different take on WW2 than the west would.

I think that's very unfair on Hollywood, who thanks to their constant endeavours to clarify history via the movie medium have pointed out it was the americans, not the british who recovered the Enigma machine during the second world war, as I confess I'd previously thought.

"what have the brits ever done for us" or was that the Romans !!