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David dasboot9/3/2023 ![]() This is a production that has had millions spent on it. The key link between the two stories is provided by Simone Strasser (Vicky Krieps), who has just arrived in La Rochelle as a translator for at first the German navy and later the Gestapo, and her brother Frank (Leonard Schleicher) who has at the last minute been brought aboard U-612 as the radio operator.įrank has become a father with a local barmaid who happens to be Jewish, and has started providing information to the resistance led by Carla (Lizzy Caplan), a former fighter from the Spanish Civil War. Meanwhile on land, there is a story based around a cell of communist resistance fighters trying to disrupt the German war effort. The U-boat itself is fairly quickly diverted into carrying out a secret mission – not something that everyone aboard appreciates doing. To expand out the series a little, this new version of Das Boot has two simultaneous storylines. In fact, by this point in the war, crypt-analysts at Bletchley Park were fairly reliably breaking the Enigma code that was being used by the German navy. It’s late 1942, and things aren’t going so well, with more U-boats being lost at sea. U-612 is fresh from the factory and Captain Hoffman is given his first command with the boat. We follow the crew of a different boat, U-612, although it too is based in La Rochelle on the French Atlantic coast. The first thing to say is that this is more of a sequel than a remake. So what should be made of a new version of the story coming from Sky Deutschland? There’s a whole genre of submarine films that have come and gone over the years that include notable entries: John McTiernan’s The Hunt for Red October and Kathryn Bigelow’s K19: The Widow Maker and probably the two of the better titles. Petersen also produced a TV mini-series version of the film. That version ran to 207 minutes of often great intensity – as though you were trapped inside the cramped confines of a U-boat alongside the forty or so men aboard the vessel. But it wasn’t until a 1998 re-release of the extended director’s cut of the film, that I saw in a cinema on Lower Regent Street, that I can honestly say that I saw it properly. I first saw the original 1981 Wolfgang Petersen version of Das Boot on TV sometime in the late 80s.
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