A year ago a great German filmmaker left us: Wolfgang Petersen. In memory of the director of The Neverending Story and Troy, today you can watch what is possibly his best film on TV: The Boat.
The war film is based on a novel and real experiences
The boat is based on a novel by Lothar-Günther Buchstein, who, as a war correspondent during the Second World War, gained an insight into everyday life in the Navy.
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The boat
The film is told from this perspective. In 1941, Lieutenant Werner (Herbert Grönemeyer) was assigned to report on a submarine led by the roughneck Kaleun (Jürgen Prochnow). U 96 has the task to sink English transport ships in the Atlantic. However, everyday life on the vehicle has little heroic about it, but is characterized by boredom, fear and extreme tension.
Why the war film is still worthwhile today
Elaborate sets, expert advice and the ensemble led by Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer, Heinz Hoenig, Martin Semmelrogge and Uwe Ochsenknecht guaranteed an authentic insight into everyday life during the Atlantic War that had rarely been seen before.
The Norddeutscher Rundfunk today shows the 200-minute director’s cut of Das Boot, which Wolfgang Petersen published in 1997. That is the best film adaptation of the classic. It offers a remarkable compromise between the lengths of submarine life, the characterization of its crew, and the sudden threat of death in confrontation with the enemy.
The best version of Das Boot is even longer than the Director’s Cut
The Director’s Cut of Das Boot will be released this Saturday August 12 from 9:45 p.m broadcast on NDR, i.e. without advertising.
For the overall best version of Das Boot you have to invest more time. This is namely the serial version (Not to be confused with the recently produced series Das Boot). This comes closest to the book. The series tells the story in six approximately 50-minute episodes. She dives more intensely into the dead time on board the submarine, i.e. the perfidious boredom of war, which can constantly change.
The series version, which is over 300 minutes long, streams subscriptions from Netflix, Magenta TV and ARD+.
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