That was an excellent one.

Sorry, this movie sucks

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This is the worst movie I have ever seen! What were you people thinking? What a stupid stupid idea and what a stupid movie. What a waste of time. This movie got 2 awards? Amazing! I would be to ashamed to make a movie like this one. But again, this is ME a guy with a class. What would have happened if Hitler..... yes really, what would have happened???? Who wrote this story? 14 or 15 year old kid or maybe someone with a mental disorder? I am not sure! The whole idea is wrong and really stupid. That's the best I can say without being more "descriptive" using our nice plain English. The best that you guys can do would be to take this movie off your list and pretend that it never existed....

Okay, to dig holes in what would make a glorious 'what if..?' means to do just that, dig holes. Apart from good performances from Rutger Hauer and Miranda Richardson and the rest of the cast, even if you accept the changearound, it's still too laughable around the historical facts we DO know about.Germany has won the war (Nazi Germany - that's important!). It's 20 years on, Churchill has buggered off to Canada leaving a capitulated Britain and guess what, America pulled out of Europe in the all - important 1944 and decides on a 'kind of' pact with Nazi Germany (As if - I know the west encouraged Saddam Hussein on the throne then kindly made him look the enemy, but this is still stretching it). Oh and by the way, Der Fuhrer, yes, the same one, Adolf Hitler is still alive at 75 (Nice catchphrase). A young American journo, Miranda Richardson is covering the forthcoming state visit of American president Joe Kennedy (It is fictional, remember) where Hitler will negotiate further with him on their wonderful pact, which incidentally, forgets that Germany is STILL fighting the war in Russia. (Maybe this is meant to show America's hate of commies and they'd rather except Nazism - another 'as if'!). In actual fact America's contrast is that the world knows nothing of the concentration camps/Nazi atrocities etc, which are about to come out in the plot. SS Chief of Police, Xavier March (Rutger Hauer) teams up with Miranda Richardson's 'Charlie MacGuire' after a lot of new facts surface and deaths occur within the Nazi idyll (Yes, idyll, another what if, as if). March finds himself isolated, on the run, because, even 20 years ago, when he served the Fuhrer lovingly in the navy, (Like they all did and denied later) he's disillusioned with the cover up of the systematic brutality of the Nazi regime. Had he known, he says, he wouldn't have served his beloved leader (Not in my name etc). He's presented with photos of the death camps that Charlie has unearthed and they both end up running from the SS/Gestapo. They manage to hand the pics to the president just as he's going to meet Hitler on a kind of Nuremburg platform. Then the deal's off, of course and a footnote, from March's son, whom he tried to abscond with, with Charlie to the USA says it's then that the Nazi regime collapses - because America knows now, or because ordinary Germans can't abide what had happened - not fully explained! We're led to believe the former, methinks!This is tripe of the first class. Firstly, it forgets Hitler had Parkinson's disease and must have had a miraculous recovery. Another fairyland tale is Hauer's sympathetic SS officer. That's an SS officer - the daily indoctrination of Aryan supremacy, untermenschen and fanaticism never featured in his upbringing nor had any influence on the fact he's made it to an SS police chief! Other factors including mention of the Americans dropping the atom bomb on Japan defy belief that if they had it they wouldn't have threatened Germany with it and would rather pull out of Europe. Another crappy piece is, I know that WE know the holocaust happened, but the presentation of the photos to Joe Kennedy showing a few emaciated bodies, however familiar to us, didn't, in reality, mean they had been instigated by the Nazis, in a big enough form. Nor was the way Charlie broke the cordon, just by pushing through and getting to the President believable - okay, I know someone shot Lincoln and Reagan, but still!It was a very cheap and poor production, with about a handful of 'Germans' making up for a crowd scene of Nuremburg-like proportions. It had all the premise of a TV movie and it shows. About the only saving grace for me, was that it showed Hitler's utopian new Berlin , or 'Germania' as he intended it named. It showed his and Speer's visionary architectural fatherland - sorry - fairyland and it's only for that that I gave this a 'four'!

I am so glad, that I have read the book first (total master piece, even better than Da Vinci's code, which integrated quite a lot of elements from Fatherland), cause the movie was a total disaster. In first 5 minutes the original story line is changed 4 times! after that I rather stopped counting mistakes. After half an hour I had to shot it down. I just couldn't stand the massacre of Harris's master piece. My advice to those who want to know the story is to read the book before seeing the movie cause there is a big possibility you will lose all your interest in the story if you start with that terrible movie. And missing this story is a sin! And now, can anybody answer me, why Americans always destroy all the good stories, when they turn them into movies?

Robert Harris's other novels have made a good transition onto the screen. "Enigma" worked well because of its top-notch cast and careful recreation of WWII England. "Archangel" was an above-average TV movie because of its compelling subject matter. "Fatherland" fell flat because it was poorly cast and made on a microscopic budget. Despite their pedigree and talent, many of the cast are clearly uncomfortable in their roles. Rutger Hauer and Michael Kitchen should have swapped scripts and Miranda Richardson should have called for a taxi. She's a very good actor but completely fails to convince as an American journalist who dresses like a 60-year-old whore.The plot is edited down to its bare bones and loses a lot of its impact in the process of being filleted. The screenplay spends far too long looking behind the shiny Nazi facade, creating an expectation of bad things about to happen far too early in its running time. Bled of all its suspense, "Fatherland" limps toward a predictable climax, robbing the story of any historical relevance or impact.There are strong similarities between "Fatherland" and "Archangel", with their stories of past events influencing the present and old ghosts that refuse to lie still, but "Fatherland" has "EPIC" stamped all over it. A story about an enduring Nazi Europe in the 1960s can't be told against a backdrop of dodgy mattes with approximately 30 extras for the crowd scenes. If ever a movie deserved to be recast and remade for substantially more than 50 quid, "Fatherland" is that movie. The Hollywood Suits should hang their heads in shame for not recognising a fantastic story and giving it to someone like Steven Spielberg.