U-571 movie review & film summary (2000)
The details of the confrontation with the Nazi sub I will not reveal. Of course it goes without saying that Tyler gets a chance to take command and see if he has what it takes to sacrifice lives in order to save his men and his mission, etc. If you remember the vivid personalities of the sub crews in "Das Boot" and "Red October," you're going to be keenly aware that no one in this movie seems like much of an individual. When they do have dialogue, it's functional, spare and aimed at the plot. Even Harvey Keitel, as the Chief, is reduced to barking out declarative sentences.
The crew members seem awfully young, awfully green, awfully fearful, and so headstrong, they border on mutiny. There's a scene where the (disguised) U.S. sub is checked out by a German reconnaissance plane, and a young sailor on the bridge panics. He's sure the plane is going to strafe them and orders the man on the deck machine gun to fire at it. His superior officer orders the gunner to stand fast. The kid screams, "Fire! Fire!" As the plane comes closer, the officer and the kid are both shouting their orders at the gunner. Without actually consulting Navy regulations, my best guess is that kid should be court-martialed.
You can enjoy "U-571" as a big, dumb war movie without a brain in its head. But that doesn't stop it from looking cheesy. Producers Dino and Martha De Laurentiis and director Jonathan Mostow ("Breakdown") have counted on fast action to distract from the plausibility of most of the scenes at sea (especially shots of the raft boarding party). Inside the sub, they have the usual cliches: The sub dives to beyond its rated depth, metal plates creak and bolt heads come loose under the pressure.
"U-571" can't be blamed for one story element that's standard in all sub movies: The subs can be hammered, battered, shelled, depth-bombed and squeezed by pressure, and have leaks, fires, shattered gauges, ruptures, broken air hoses, weak batteries and inoperable diesel engines--but in the heat of action, everything more or less somehow works. Better than the screenplay, anyway.
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