IMDb #117 Review: Downfall (2004)

Source: Wikipedia

More Nazis? If movies even somewhat capture reality, then the Second World War was the most happening place in the history of the universe.

But this time the tables are turned. Then overturned, then burned to smoldering embers. This take on European Armageddon reflects a radical perspective -- the fall of the Third Reich, as seen from inside Berlin. Directed by legitimate Germans. With narration by the lady who was actually there in the bunker with Uncle Adolf. Hardcore history.

Back in the day, when she was young and naive and typed as well as Stormtroopers shoot, she was Hitler's secretary. The dictator dictates, the transcriber transcribes. Early on, when the war went well, he proves remarkably forgiving of the new girl's abundant typos.

In the last days, as Berlin cracks in the vise-grip of the Russian war machine, the Aryan Antichrist displays less composure. He's angry, stubborn, and worst of all, stupid. He shouts that his generals have betrayed him, and thus ignores their good ideas to stick to his own delusional tactics. His closest advisers fear to contradict his anti-logic.

These represent one of three camps on the Nazi sinking ship. The high-ranking officers who grimly remain at their posts, even as their pant legs grow worryingly soggy. More exciting are the party animals who throw frenzied orgies as the buildings shake and the electricity stutters. Less fascinating but more practical, the sane remnant who don life preservers and hop off the boat -- they risk being shot as traitors by their own people as well as the rising Soviet wave.

A handful of stories run parallel and intertwine. In the bunker, the secretary watches her national hero melt down like Chernobyl and feels the fallout poisoning everybody int he vicinity. Elsewhere, a father struggles to reclaim his suicidally patriotic son from the Hitler Youth. A doctor wants to leave but remains behind to aid the wounded, even though he's not a medical doctor, even though his job entails sawing off limbs without such luxuries as anesthetic.

Eventually even the truest believers realize all is lost. The Reich's most elite suicide club follows through with their black pact. The saddest case? The Goebbels family -- the perfect doe-eyed Aryan children sing to the disconsolate Fuhrer. At their doting mother's insistence, they pass around a cup of "medicine" like the worst Communion ever.

The mood of palpable desperation melts into raw despair. The combat is anything but glorious -- loud, messy, ugly as sin. And when the designated good guys win, the "where are they now" credits hit like a shower of icewater. And the thralls of history's monsters look disturbingly human.

178 minutes.