I went for it and watched the 4 hour 41 minute mini series, it was worth it. The time seemed to fly by but I would recommend the 3 hour 30 minute Director's Cut for this HoF.

I read on IMDB's trivia page that the interior of the sub was a recreation based on the actual blue prints of a WWII German U boat. It looked real and very claustrophobic. It was cramped inside and hard to believe 50 men could live like that for long periods of time. The sub was in many ways the leading character, with the actors being secondary. That's perhaps as it should be as the men are interchangeable with other fresh faced recruits but the U boat and it's mechanical health determines if these men live or die and by 1941 many of the U boats had been sunk.

I liked that this wasn't uber action packed, expect for some very tense moments when the sub was under attack from depth charges, which looked frightening as all hell. At the start of the film it has a screen crawl that says of the 40,000 German sub mariners, 30,000 never returned alive, wow. The wastage of war...and that wastage of human lives is what this film is about...as the crew of the sub could attest too.