Surprisingly incoherent and boring

How sad is this?

Captivating movie !

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

In the film Willi Herold is shown as a man that was forced into his actions to save his own life, like everyone human would do and that thereby he even saved the lifes of others... and I think its important to be very carefull with this information.

An interesting movie for 2 main reasons: 1) it shows the fragilities of the Nazi Germany towards the end of the war, with many German soldiers deserting the army (something nobody talks about) and 2) it shows the depths of the human ego and the decadence of character when power is given arbitrarily

Halfway through I was thinking about leaving the cinema, which I never do. The sheer brutality of the images is unbearable at times and I consider it reassuring to my mental condition that it is. But what was more unsettling is this feeling that the movie chose this serious setting simply to get away with disgusting violence. Of course this is not a new discussion, Inglorious Basterds, which I loved, comes to mind. But while IB did not pretend to be serious, this one seemingly does. It takes the absurdly-cruel parts of other great films (think of the jammed executioners gun in Schindlers List and others) and throws them together, making you think of these great movie-moments and forgiving that this one actually is not very good. The first act was great, threw us into the story right away, it catches the viewer. But then? It pretends to be a study on the brutality of men but is it? What we see are not men. These are monsters. Everything that would link their behaviour to that of normal people is gone. No backstory, no motivations explained. Anything that would make the viewer go "shit, that could be me!" is taken out in favour of evil monsters from planet Nazi in a galaxy far far away raging around. This depiction of fascism as a mere costume of evil has always bugged me. And while Inglorious Basterds or even the Indiana Jones movies with their Nazis do not try to be serious I could enjoy the stereotypical bad guys portrait in them. This movie on the other hand pretends it has something important to tell about human psyche. But it does not, there is better ones that actually tell you WHY people get brutal and don't just show images that make you go: "Wow. That was cruel". The images are moving but only in a way that "Saw" or "Hostel" are moving. If you make a movie set in Nazi-Germany be aware of the seriousness of the topic and dont let viewers get away with the sheer impression that the Nazis were unmotivated, alien monsters with just an inherent evilness.Surprisingly the credits rocked me. They made me perplexed, they made me laugh, they gave me a real feeling of absurdity but as they continued, they made me scared, they left me thinking. Everything I was lacking before - it was in the credits.

The film revolves around authority, the trust we tend to have towards a person we endow with authority, official ranks, hierarchy, "Kameradschaft", the sense of belonging to a group, and (for me at least), egoism in general. It is also quite brutal and sadistic. The story itself, with the most improbable twists, is taken from a real life story at the end of the war. It is rare in war films to have the perspective of the criminal. We do not sympathise with him, but rather he impersonates the beast in every one of us. Another merit of the film is quite natural: German actors can of course impersonate German soldiers better than for example US ones, it also gives a realistic touch to the film as opposed to US war movies featuring evil nazis. The message of the film was for me clear and delivered with a great impression - I will not write it here as it would be flat in my words.