![]() ![]() For example, an SS officer rocks up in Portugal to investigate a plot to steal Nazi gold. And everyone, on both sides, is half-numbed by grief. News from Russia is so bad that teenagers are happy to go to a losing war in a U-boat. Now Nazi Germany is being slowly bombed to bits. It’s a mood change from the earlier seasons of Das Boot, at the opening stages of the war, when the German U-boats ruled the waves and it was all glory and audiences with high-up Nazis. ![]() An older German commander, Hoffman, has lost his as well. The stage is well-set for a showdown between Jack and the German U-boat commander called Ehrenberg. I miss the grind and terror of non-stop U-boat drama, but there is depth in the characters, particularly the two German teenagers who are ‘volunteered’ for U-boat duty as a way to get out of castration in a work-camp. It’s an endurance contest for the viewer, too, but at least we’re not in a metal tube with 40 men and one toilet.But still, it’s a grower. Thematically - this “Das Boot,” like the original, is concerned with honor and courage with who breaks down and who rises up. The improbable Saturday-matinee challenges the show throws at its heroines and heroes work Then, about halfway through the season, both the land and sea tales take radical, sensationalistic twists. Klaus Hoffmann, the captain, deals with rising tensions on U-612 while Strasser is gradually radicalized through her contact with a resistance leader who happens to be American (Lizzy Caplan). There’s more to see, but it’s more diffuse, and the continual cutting between the land story and the sea story gins up the suspense while making individual scenes more perfunctory.įor three-plus episodes, those stories build in a reasonably interesting and plausible fashion. The story has been expanded into a conventional modern TV production, with its international cast and its multiple intertwined plots to fill the many hours. One noticeable effect of the 38-year gap since the film is the improvement in special effects, even on a TV budget - the scenes on the water look immeasurably more lifelike. (Nazi sailors on shore leave are a violent crowd.) At first determined to prove her loyalty to the Germans, she falls in with the French resistance, not because of Nazi atrocities but for love and female solidarity. Vicky Krieps plays Simone Strasser, an Alsatian translator whose brother is aboard U-612. While U-612 zigs and zags around the Atlantic on a secret and highly improbable mission, the real star of the series scurries around La Rochelle. Once again there’s a noble captain (Rick Okon in the Jurgen Prochnow role) stuck with a zealous Nazi (August Wittgenstein) as first officer. The result is an odd hybrid: The maritime section of the story follows a different boat, U-612, that somehow keeps having misadventures - a strafing, a fall to the sea floor - that closely mirror those of U-96. The eight-episode first season, drawn again from Lothar Gunther-Buchheim’s 1973 novel “Das Boot” and also from a later book of his, “Die Festung,” was originally announced as a remake of the film but then repositioned as a sequel. On the evidence of this handsomely produced show, though, the main benefit of opening up the story is gaining access to a whole new set of World War II cliches. Granted, you’d have to be pretty fearless to set eight hours of TV aboard a submarine, in the manner of Wolfgang Petersen’s film, which took place almost entirely within the confines of the ill-fated U-96. This German-British production, released Monday on Hulu, is a surf-and-turf proposition: Half the action takes place aboard another cramped U-boat while half takes place ashore, among the Nazi occupiers and French collaborators and resisters of La Rochelle, France, where the boats are based. ![]() Fans of the emblematic submarine adventure “Das Boot,” an international hit in 1981, may be alarmed by descriptions of the new “Das Boot” television series. ![]()
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