Valkyrie 2008, Bryan Singer
Saw this one tonight. It's a good, involving flick. Not a great one, no masterpiece, but still a damn good ride.
There are not many historic national heroes Germany can point to from the Second World War. The names of infamous Nazi evil are well known, as they should be, but not every soul in Germany was either dark or complicit in their silence. Some tried to stand up against the wrongs of the Third Reich. One such brave man was Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg.
There have been other retellings of this story, on both the big and small screens, many of them made in Germany, and the best-known in the United States probably being the 1990 CBS TV movie
"The Plot to Kill Hitler" starring the late Brad Davis as Colonel von Stauffenberg. But with
Valkyrie and Tom Cruise in the lead role there is the best potential yet for this amazing chapter of history to reach a worldwide mass audience. Even if it comes wrapped primarily as an entertainment.
Cruise is very good in the lead, playing a Nazi Colonel who is wounded in the African campaign and returns home to find himself recruited into a conspiracy to assassinate Adolph Hitler. While von Stauffenberg is amenable to the idea, he disagrees with the strategy, which has produced many failed attempts on the Fürer. He wants in, but sees it has to be more than just the death of Hitler. If he is to participate it must have a chance of truly turning over the entire government and the negotiating a surrender to the Allies. He has a rather ingenious plan. Operation Valkyrie is a wartime contingency plan to protect Berlin and the seat of power in a crisis, an order that would give the Reserve Army and the Generals at the command center the power to supercede all other authority. The plan is to kill Hitler (and hopefully Himler), then quickly enact Valkyrie and seize control in a coup that, if done properly, could be relatively bloodless and find the SS and all ranking officials and officers not with them in custody before the dust has settled.
You need not be an honors student in history to know that the plot, enacted on the 20th of July 1944, did not succeed. But exactly how and why it didn't work and
how close they came to ending the War is fascinating and well realized as a dramatic narrative. Like
All the President's Men and the best recreations of historical events, it's amazing how much suspense can be generated when you already basically know the ending before it even starts. Bryan Singer's
Valkyrie is a tight two hours with about one half the set-up and the second half the fateful day. Once the assassination is attempted there are some very nice suspense scenes. Not Hitchcock level of mastery, but very well done without relying on a lot of fancy filmmaking bells and whistles. Other than the battlefield sequence in Tunisia that introduces Cruise as the Colonel there is very little "action". Thank goodness nobody took any of the Studio notes that surely came down the chain of command and suggested a lot of elaborate gun battles and CGI explosions might be required to make it a blockbuster. It's quite old fashioned in that way, and refreshingly so. Even minus slick action spectacle (or maybe because of its absence)
Valkyrie will keep you on the edge of your seat. There are lots of characters moving about in this conspiracy, and though we don't get a heck of a lot of time to know each one the film does do a fine job of keeping all of the pertinent facts and characters straight and moving the plot along to its inevitable conclusion, helped by a strong supporting cast including Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Terence Stamp, among others.
While the streamlined narrative is very effective for pace and building to nearly an hour's worth of suspense as a conclusion, it's also the film's main weakness. While at this point I think it's a given that we as modern audiences, even the undereducated, all understand why Hitler and the Nazi's were wrong and that this conspiracy, had it worked, would have been a wonderful thing, the film never lets us know what the
specific motivations for any of the key players are. Even von Stauffenberg, other than a sense of 'Hitler bad, end war now', you don't get any revelation of what made him willing to risk everything to unseat Hitler and the Nazis. Without even his reasons, much less a few of the other key conspirators, I think a big piece of the history and of the drama of these characters is missing. For example Cruise's Colonel does make one brief mention of the Concentration Camps in a list of things that have to be shut down should they take power, but even in that scene it's not clear if he or anybody else in that room really know what the Camps are, or if so how they found out or what they think of Jews or anything else. We just know they have decided this assassination and coup are necessary. Obviously removing Hitler is good for Germany and humanity, but how did this group of military men and politicians arrive at this conclusion in 1943 and 1944?
But given those limitations, as a wartime thriller,
Valkyrie is a success. As for this being an almost entirely English-speaking cast, be they American, English, Irish what have you, it's an age-old conceit in the movie business and frankly I found them speaking in their natural voices far less distracting than if they had all adopted German accents for the English dialogue. I think in the best of situations either it is made in the country of origin or, as with Clint Eastwood's
Letters from Iwo Jima for example, made with actors all speaking the original language even in an "American" production. Singer uses the same device director John McTiernan employed for
The Hunt for Red October and then
The 13th Warrior where the first four or five lines Cruise speaks are in German, in voice-over as he is writing in his journal, but then mid-sentence switches to English and we the audience are to understand that the actors won't be speaking German but obviously the characters and historical figures would have been. It works fine for the movie, especially a movie that is more purely a thriller than a history.
GRADE: B
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