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As everyone knows, the only good movies are ones with total babes in them. You want to make a great movie? Put hot chicks in them. Babes, babes, babes, babes, babes. Nothing makes a movie more watchable than pretty girls. Or submarines. I have never understood why, but it is a documented fact that the only babe-less films that are ever any good involve trapping a group of manly men at the bottom of the ocean. Crimson Tide. The Hunt For Red October. Das Boot. Operation Petticoat. The list goes on. Well, OK, Petticoat had some chicks in it... But the latest sub adventure doesn't. Not a one, nay nay nay. And it's still a hum-dinger of a show. U-571 is not only the latest underwater adventure; it's easily the best movie in years that has more numbers than letters in the title. (Se7en was spelled out.) It's World War II. The German's are winning. So the Americans have to save the day by trying to steal an old, rickety typewriter named Enigma. Things go well, they get the typewriter, but their sub sinks, and they have to try to make it back to safety in a crippled Nazi sub. This is actually based on a real situation that involved the British, which they admit at the end of the movie. Hollywood must of thought that watching a bunch of Brits in a sub was too boring, so they brought in the Yanks. Which, in the end, is just fine with me. Bring it on! One wonders how many times we can be excited by the same perils. I mean just how many different things can we do with a sub? Let's see... we can have it dive deeper than it was ever supposed to. We can have ships on the surface bomb the sub with depth charges. We can have a compartment fill with water and drown some brave crew members who stayed behind to make sure the rest of the ship is saved. We can shoot some torpedoes. That's about it. Unless you toss in a giant sea monster. Which needs to happen more often. Even the moments of high tension are all borrowed from every other sub movie: There's the moment when the young private has two officers yelling at him with contrasting orders. "Shoot!" "No! Don't shoot!" "God damn it, shoot, or we all die!" "No!!! Don't shoot no matter what happens!!!" There's the moment when the sub is sinking seemingly uncontrollably. "200! 215! 230!" "My God, this ship was designed to be instantly pulverized at 180! We can't survive much longer!" And of course, they can never use the radio. So there are your stock situations, who are the stock characters in today's sub adventure? Well, there's Matthew McConaughey, the plucky bongo-playing leading man thrust into a situation he wasn't really looking for (Denzel Washington, Alec Baldwin). There's Harvey Keitel, the grizzled old-timer who's been around the block a few too many times (Gene Hackman, Sean Connery). And then there's a bunch of young seamen who will die horribly, or save the ship bravely, or desperately miss their best girl who they're gonna marry once they get home, or who swear they're gonna freeze up if they ever see battle but it turns out they come through when we least expect it. You know the types. Is there anything new in this movie? No. But so what? You've got tons of steel sinking into the cold, cold deep. Pass the popcorn. I think Hollywood can save itself a lot of money with these movies. There's really no need to make any more submarine movies. Just re-release Crimson Tide and Das Boot over and over again. They can even give them different names. It'll be like a game. Dreamworks will release 'Submarine!' and we can all go and excitedly wonder if they're gonna show Crimson Tide or Das Boot. It'd be fun, and everyone's guaranteed a good movie. Anyway, U-571 gets 3.571 Babylons. It may seem like a lot, but I have a soft spot for any movie which includes the words, "Dive! Dive! Dive!" Add this movie to the legions of forgettable films that the SMC spends WAY too much time talking about. This movie is so lame, as the SMC was writing his review, his hair transformed magically into a Mullet. U-571 Special Note From Boris: Comrades, Mailing list has been broken. Capitalistic Critic Pig whined like little baby. It is now fixed. Long live the revolution. Boris |
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