SERIES PREMIERE: The original
Das Boot drama, based on the same Lothar-Gunther Buchheim novel, was released as a movie in 1981 – a gripping, powerful film directed by Wolfgang Petersen, telling of life (and death) aboard a German U-boat submarine during WWII. Petersen was so good at both the action sequences and the character development, and especially at filming in confined spaces to relay a feeling of claustrophobia, that he eventually was embraced by Hollywood, making such similarly themed action movies as
Air Force One and
The Perfect Storm. (Previously, Petersen had directed one of my favorite children’s fantasies of the 1980s,
The Neverending Story. I was thrilled and impressed by
Das Boot when it hit American theaters in 1981 – then even more excited when I learned that the movie was an edited version of a much longer German TV miniseries. The movie is just over two hours long, but the miniseries, televised in Germany in 1985, was closer to five hours (six, with commercials, when imported by the U.S., and televised by the then-classy Bravo cable network). I had always thought that the miniseries came first, but the reverse was true: German television had helped finance the expensive
Das Boot film, and once it became an international success, capitalized by retrieving and editing in hours of footage shot for the movie but not used in the original final cut. Regardless, the length of the long-form miniseries format allowed viewers to get even more immersed, so to speak, in the palpable tensions of
Das Boot – so this new sequel, starting nine months after the action of the original and focusing on a new U-boat and crew, benefits at times from that same asset. But Hulu’s
Das Boot divides its narrative between the U-boat sequences and a parallel story line in which Vicky Krieps plays an interpreter who crosses path with the war resistance efforts. (Also co-starring, when she eventually shows up: Lizzy Caplan, who was so good in Showtime’s
Masters of Sex.) This broadens the focus, but also dilutes the claustrophobia that was so central to the original
Das Boot. As Mike Hale writes so cleverly in
The New York Times, this approach to the new
Das Boot miniseries (actually a series, since it's already been renewed for a second season) turns it into “a surf and turf proposition.”
For a full review, see David Hinckley’s All Along the Watchtower.