TV reviews

In Germany: Aired on Sky Deutschland in 2018
In the UK: Wednesdays, 9pm, Sky Atlantic

Das Boot isn’t the sequel you’ve been expecting. Okay, you probably weren’t expecting a sequel to the 1981 German cinema classic Das Boot at all, let alone one to original author Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s sequel Die Festung as well.

But picking up the action a mere nine months after the end of the original movie, Das Boot is oddly enough also a sequel (of sorts) to Babylon Berlin.

It doesn’t look like it at first. Indeed, watching the new Das Boot, you can’t help but notice how similar it looks at times to the original movie, with shots and scenes clearly designed not just to homage but also mirror its progenitor. There are the same shots in dock, there are similar attack scenes as in the movie and there are similar drills and instruments – at least at first.

True, it’s all in high gloss Ultra 4K, but if Wolfgang Petersen had access to high gloss Ultra 4K, this is the look that Das Boot (1981) would have had.

But that gloss is very familiar if you’ve seen Babylon Berlin and the similarities don’t end there. Because if Babylon Berlin is the story of how a country collectively went mad, Das Boot is the story of how it began to regain its senses.

Resistance

Set in 1942 in occupied France, Das Boot has two real narrative strands. As you might expect, the first takes place on board a German U-Boat, a new, more advanced class of submarine than that shown in the movie. But while the film’s U-Boat was populated by old and experienced hands, this submarine is suffering from the same problem as the rest of Germany – too many of the old hands have been killed in action. Now, only the young and inexperienced are available.

Captaining this boat is Rick Okon, the son of a famous pre-war submarine commander who’s only just out of naval college yet already in charge of his own vessel. This causes his first officer, August Wittgenstein, no end of annoyance – Wittgenstein is one of the few old hands left, a season warrior of the ‘wolf pack’, but without the connections that his new boss has.

Things start to become difficult almost immediately, once Okon starts obeying his orders – even if that means leaving battle and abandoning the other members of the wolf pack. Soon, life on board is getting pretty mutinous, thanks to a campaign of whispers.

The other narrative strand takes place on dry land in La Rochelle, France. Vicky Krieps (the real-life granddaughter of wartime Luxembourg Resistance member Robert Krieps) is a trilingual German from Alsace and member of the German navy – just like her brother, who’s on board our U-boat. Being German, she never fit in in Alsace, after the Treaty of Versailles handed the area over to France, but is now glad that it’s part of the Greater Germany again.

However, it’s still not an easy life being German. There’s the pesky French resistance, going around blowing things up, and who seem to want to recruit her. Krieps’ brother turns out to have been passing black market morphine to a member of the resistance. There’s a gestapo police officer who seems a little bit too interested in her. There’s a bit too much brutality, rape and covering up going on for her starry-eyed ideals about Germany to survive, either. Will she join the fighting free French or will she stay a loyal German citizen?

Continue reading “Fifth-episode verdict: Das Boot (Germany: Sky Deutschland; UK: Sky Atlantic)”