Downfall

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Working on a WW2 project and this was one of the bigger war movie recommendations I've seen. Only aware of the memes.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I was fully prepared for this to be a boring movie, and at 2-and-a-half hours, it really wasn't enticing to sit through that much just to see the ending that's already been mocked and parodied up and down the internet.

But surprisingly, that scene actually takes place in the first third of the movie, and as a glimpse into the Fuhrerbunker in the final days of Nazi Germany, this movie was actually really interesting.

There's no overt score, there's little you could call character development, and it's not as though a cast of Nazis is especially endearing to begin with, so I can really only credit my engagement to the quality of the acting, which is not a topic I tend to critique too closely.

It's typical of Hollywood and video games to paint the Nazis as 2-dimensional cartoons to be shot at, but even moreso than Das Boot, another German WW2 Nazi "slice of life" movie, here we see some genuine humanity among our Schutzstaffel cast.

Maybe it's just my exposure to the telephone game of time and pop culture that has lowered my standards for historically accurate representation, but I am once again thankful that somebody took an effort to get some things right.

Hitler's an obvious stand-out with the actor using a lot of body language to present Mein Fuhrer as the ailing, increasingly unreasonable dictator directing a war of fantasy from his concrete prison.

That said, for all of the horrible things Hitler says, and all of the insanity his subordinates ascribe to him behind his back, and even the dormant supervillain of Goebbels or his wife who lies to and poisons all of their kids because she's an abominably callous ****ing monster... Eva Braun is the scariest character in this whole movie.


She just has this totally psychotic wide-eyed half-smile at all times, just blissfully unconcerned with anything that could damper the mood, like a real life yandere character. She freaked me the **** out with her performance. Like, even if hypothetically you agreed with the National Socialist ideal, it's hard not to imagine any of these inner circle guys looking at Eva Braun and getting some SERIOUS ****ing doubts about their line of work.

I'm not sure how accurate that was to her real life personality of course, but in terms of how deranged someone would have to be to marry Hitler 2 days before they kill themselves, she certainly fits the bill.

Everyone else smiles like they're trying to make the best of a bad situation.

Eva Braun smiles like she keeps a dead dismembered Jewish child in a suitcase to pleasure herself with offscreen.

I also appreciate the gradation of reasonableness among the Nazi staff members. Some are hopeless and realistic, others are hopelessly unrealistic, and some are weirdly in the middle, agreeable in some respects and disagreeable in others. And they argue with each other, as they would, because they're all trapped on a sinking ship with a gun to the back of the first person who jumps.

Thoughout this movie I found myself repeatedly pausing it to look up various details about the different characters and the things they did. Like, I didn't know Hitler's body was set on fire, let alone outside the Fuhererbunker.

But consistently each time I looked up a detail, it appeared to be corroborated in some way by witness accounts of the events. And each of the characters in the movie genuinely LOOK like the people did in real life. This is also a German movie, so I didn't have to concern myself with bigwig Hollywood inserts like Liam Neeson putting on a shitty accent.

Beyond the acting, I think the biggest point in favor of this movie is that it really is presented, not as any sort of hero narrative or other typical plot writers like to wring out of history, but as a narrow sequence of events at one period in time that's genuinely just fascinating in it's own right. This movie really seems like it was made by people who just thought this moment in history was really interesting and would make a good movie.

And I think those are the best events to adapt to screen. If you're going the route of non-fiction, pick some non-fiction that's already a good story, not one you have to shuffle around and diminish or embellish to fit a conventional narrative format.

If you entirely ripped out the historical context and all of the names and places were fictional instead, this would still be a neat movie.


That said, while this was definitely engaging, and I think the actors were great, and yadayadayada... this really isn't my preferred flavor of movie anyway.

I liked it, and really do struggle to fault it with much, but it's also not the sort of experience that I can see myself eager to rewatch.


Final Verdict:

[Good]