Das Boot: The Original Uncut Version

I have something of a weakness for epically long films, and if you put subtitles in there, I'm even weaker.

Yet once I get a copy of an epic film, I have great difficulty finding time to watch. That's pretty much the impetus of Little Round Mirrors; I'm making myself find time.

With Das Boot: The Original Uncut Version, I even found a loophole.

Das Boot is a German film set during World War II and depicts the crew of a German U-boat as they patrol the Atlantic, looking for Allied convoys.

Before today, I had never seen Das Boot all the way through. I found The Original Uncut Version for $10 at my local Best Buy a while back, so I pulled the trigger — a total blind buy on reputation alone. There are several home video versions of Das Boot out there, but this is the comprehensive version, the way Wolfgang Petersen intended for German audiences to watch.

When I got this home from the store, I tried watching immediately and failed. I didn't have the time. This thing is 294 minutes long — Petersen originally filmed this as a five-part television miniseries for his native Germany, and only cut up the film for consumption abroad.

Therein lies the loophole this time.

For this entry, I realized I could watch this film in chunks and not feel guilty or somehow cheated out of the cinematic experience (or look lazy to my faithful 22 or so readers, who pretty much know me as kind of lazy anyway).

So on this misty Monday evening, I started Das Boot: The Original Uncut Version, but broke up the viewing with various pauses (to check baseball scores, eat dinner, do something besides watch Das Boot, etc.).

I would equate Das Boot to something like Band of Brothers, though not as episodic. The film does not have logical stopping points except for the breaking point at the end of Disc 1, so unless you pause/stop at a fade to black (there are several), you pretty much have to just stop whenever. That makes watching this in logical chunks a bit of a challenge. This is rather like reading a novel with no chapter breaks.

Life on a WWII sub was hurry-up-and-wait, with days of tedium mixed with hours of maddening tension and minutes of intense action beyond anything most people will ever experience. Germans, at least in this film, are depicted as humans with flaws, quirks, loves, wants, needs, and fears, just like Brits or Americans or any of the other Allied forces, and I have no problem with that, even though this film was highly controversial upon release in the early 1980s. Petersen went out of his way to depict his crew with as little propaganda as possible, mainly because any propaganda would serve to dehumanize these characters. Though he depicts these characters as "following orders," he does not link them to the Holocaust — in fact I don't recall more than a passing mention of such things.

Telling a story from the enemy's perspective is valuable and necessary. They can still be wrong, but they're also still human. This is worthy discussion.

Das Boot: The Original Uncut Version is extraordinary, and easily the best film ever made about a submarine crew foreign or domestic. Petersen's attention to story and character make for gripping viewing, and though the film seems every bit of 5 hours long and is not perfect, the 5 hours do not feel lost or misspent.

Still, I do not know if or when I'll ever watch Das Boot again. That is not to say that I didn't enjoy the film — on the contrary, this is an astonishing cinematic achievement (despite the many obvious miniatures and fake backgrounds).

But this film requires a substantial investment of time and attention — subtitles must be read, which makes typing this tricky, incidentally — and I'm reluctant to invest this much time very often. So why own a copy? As of this writing, I can't imagine watching Das Boot multiple times. Isn't that why we buy movies?

On the other hand, I can't help but think that maybe several years down the line, I'll have another misty, dreary day to pass, and the time will seem right, and I'll give five more hours to Wolfgang Petersen's classic film.

That actually sounds cool.

I might even write about that.