![]() It isn’t just Nazis which enrage them, but also the futility of the battles they’re leading their men into. Fellow U-boat captain Thomsen arrives drunk before giving a speech which mocks both the Fuhrer and Churchill. At the start of Das Boot he and some of his officers visit a raucous French nightclub in La Rochelle, their base. Several of his officers share his disillusionment, as do other captains. There’s a gulf between old-guard seamen like him, and most of the young crew (“all wind and smoke” he calls them, likening their voyage to being on “a children’s crusade”). For the captain (a brilliantly jaded yet stoic Jürgen Prochnow) the boat is his partner and he takes pride in her ability to withstand the worst that the Allies, bad luck and the weather can throw at her. World-weary and war-weary, battle has aged him – he’s meant to be 30, the oldest man on the boat, but he comes across as much older with the weight of both experience and expectation heavy on him. He’s not a lover of war and he hates the Nazis. “They are drinking at the bar, celebrating our sinking! Not yet my friends, not yet!” shouts U-96’s captain with delight, as they practically bounce up onto the surface of the narrow Straits of Gibraltar, which they’ve been marooned at the bottom of for 15 hours. A Das Boot franchise? There have been far worse crimes.ĭas Boot starts on Sky Atlantic on 6 February at 9pm.*** Check out my submarine movies section *** Maybe there are even more stories to emerge from the murky depths. It has already impressed enough to secure itself a second season. That every life-and-death incident on the sub ripples out to affect the lives of those on land means there’s plenty of human interest, too. As grim and fatalistic as it is, Das Boot never seemed a story that begged to be remade, but the doomed submarine with its walking dead crew is a powerful premise that can still tell us something about humanity in extremis in general, and the futility of war in particular. While forgetting what made the original great is always a danger with reboots, equally fatal is the failure to offer anything new. Simone and Carla are the extra dimension Das Boot needs. Simone would like to do the right thing, but this is not a world that rewards virtue. An underground trade in morphine only complicates matters. As Frank faces underwater death daily, Simone is barely more comfortable knowing that her new acquaintances are her passport to incarceration, torture and death. Translator Simone Strasser (the brilliant Vicky Krieps), sister of the U-boat’s radio operator, Frank, gets tangled up with a French Resistance cell led by an American woman Carla Monroe (deftly played by Lizzy Caplan). Photograph: Nik Konietzny/Bavaria Fictionīut the sequel spends a lot of time on dry land, too. Simone Strasser (Vicky Krieps) gets caught up in a Resistance cell that could result in incarceration, torture and death. The opening slate tells us: “The battle for control of the Atlantic is turning against the Germans … 40,000 German sailors served on U-boats during the second world war … 30,000 never returned.” Right from the off, we know the U-boat is a tomb. We’d seen second world war stories from the German point of view before, but rarely at such close quarters, with so much tension and such devastating results. Most British viewers first encountered Das Boot when the TV miniseries aired in 1985. Andreas Prochaska’s eight-part series is a classy revisiting of the Das Boot universe that retains the claustrophobic doom of Wolfgang Petersen’s classic film while weaving in enough new threads to give it its own identity. This is no easy task.įortunately, they nail it. The launch of Das Boot this week comes with equal parts fear and excitement it will float or sink on its ability to resurrect the spirit of the original while showing us something we haven’t seen before. The aim is to engage a new audience with a known winner while keeping fans of the original onboard. Not that this has ever stopped the industry from remixing the classics. Rifling through television’s ever-growing canon will always leave you open to accusations of grave-robbing, sacrilege or being too lazy to come up with your own ideas. Never go back, some say, and you can see the argument. P lunderers of TV past will always run into opposition.
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