The recent resurgence in Hollywood of the war movie genre has given moviegoers some truly spectacular films, such as Spielberg’s recent Oscar winner Saving Private Ryan. But
in the wake of such great films, we have to endure hundreds of imitations that attempt to mine once more the fertile ground of World War II for some serious subject matter. Invariably these films tend to fall incredibly short of the mark, and U-571 is no exception.
U-571 is a typical war epic, only shining in a few moments of real action and suspense, but never packing an emotional wallop. The characters in U-571 are uninteresting, so we never really care about their fate as human beings. The story is rather
predictable as well, and it is easy for us to realize early on in the film each step the plot will take in its spiral downward to a very anticlimactic ending.
The movie’s title comes from a German U-boat stranded in the middle of the Atlantic. American forces have intercepted the U-boat’s distress signal, and they decide to send one of their submarines, posing as the German supply ship, to hijack U-571 and
capture an encryption device on board called the Enigma. But the American sailors who cross over to the U-boat are stranded there when their own ship is destroyed by the German rescue forces. Thus the nine Americans remaining on board U-531 have to figure
out how to survive aboard this disabled foreign ship so that they can bring the Enigma back to their superiors.
The suspense of the film would have been much more intense had the trailers for the film not already given away the fact that the sailors would be trapped on board the German ship. Add to that the fact that it’s a matter of historical record that America beat the Germans in World War II, and you already can guess the outcome of the movie. Many of the battle scenes that would normally have been intense lose their edge when you
realize that the good guys are probably going to end up winning. Plus, because the ship is damaged, the battle scenes quickly become boring when all the crew of U-571 can do is
run away very slowly.
Some genuinely good actors were hired on to play some key roles in this film. Matthew McConaughey plays the executive officer forced to take command of the crew stranded aboard the German ship, and Harvey Keitel serves as his second-in-command, a
grizzled war veteran advising McConaughey on how to command in such a pressure situation. A subplot provided early on involves McConaughey being denied a command of a ship because his superiors don’t think he’s ready, but this idea that he can prove his worth in the situation he is thrust into is one that Hollywood has beaten to death over the years. In this film it never is fully played out.
Other characters are little more than stereotypes transplanted from their roles in previous action and war films. There’s the tough private who questions McConaughey’s authority but eventually comes around to believe in him. There’s a high-ranking
intelligence man who has little actual training in the field and at first collapses under pressure before finally proving his worth towards the end. There’s a young, frightened sailor who eventually has to step up bravely to perform a task that might mean the death of him.
Finally the truly uninspired, unoriginal direction of the film totally drains most of the remaining flavor away. This movie looks like any other action movie, filmed in dark and confined spaces to try to highlight the tension. Explosions are reproduced by little more than some shaking of the camera, and in a brazen attempt to enlist the audience’s sympathies, the director runs text over the end of the film to honor actual World War II
soldiers who performed missions such as these in real life. Essentially, this technique cheapens the whole movie to being little more than propaganda.
In short, U-571 looks like every other war movie ever made. With characters and a story so similar to those we’ve seen before, the sailors in U-571 virtually become indistinguishable from those in other films, and we can easily anticipate what will happen
to them long before it actually does. Renting an old war movie would be much wiser than going to see this film. Not only is it cheaper, but at least then you will also have a genuine
sense of nostalgia that U-571 fails to reach.
