Valkyrie

Valkyrie (2008) – on rental. This was a hugely hyped film depicting the most well-known of assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler when Allied forces were approaching from both the West and East sides of Germany. The film was directed by Bryan Singer, whose Superman Returns and two X-Men films I enjoyed a lot.

I didn’t catch the film when it was screened in Singapore this year though. Two reasons: I had doubts about the choice of Tom Cruise as the key player in the assassination plot, and secondly I was left unimpressed with the trailers.

The thing about Cruise is that he’s so well-known that it’s hard to watch any film with him in it without thinking aloud “Hey that’s Tom Cruise on the screen!” The one exception was Tropic Thunder, but that had him wearing a fat suit, studs, and ear rings.

The physical alterations of Cruise into the crucial role of Claus von Stauffenberg were extensive: he had an eye patch on, missing fingers, hair cut and a German officer’s uniform. But there was no mistaking it was the well-known actor underneath. That really broke quite a bit of the immersion when eventually watching the film on rental.

Secondly, the film has a sort of sanitized look about it. The film received late – and I’m guessing possibly reluctantly given – permission to film at key historical locations in Germany, but it didn’t save the film from feeling rather artificial. The German army personnel all look tidy, uniforms straightened, clean-shaven.

And most tellingly, for a city that was getting bombed, the streets sure don’t look it. For all purposes, this sort of shiny veneer I typically associate with a TV production and not certainly a Hollywood big budget film.

That said, quite a good cast was assembled for this production, though funnily it was a largely Brit cast (with a token Germans) that I recognized easily. There was Bernard Hill – LOTR’s King Theoden – in a small almost cameo appearance at the start of the film, Terence ‘General Zod’ Stamp, Kenneth Branagh who looked like he’d dyed his hair white for this film, Tom Wilkinson, Tom Hollander in a small role as a Hitler aide, and Bill Nighy, who was also in Underworld: Rise of the Lycans that I’d just watch and will blog about next. Mostly middle-aged to old actors, and who do know how to act.

Make no mistake too: this isn’t a war film. It’s a drama that takes place during a period of war. A lot of scenes occur in rooms, Reich offices, meeting rooms and the like. Aside from a short battle sequence at the start of the show, and lots of soldiers running and assembling about from the middle act onwards, there’s little other violence and action. The story is told primarily through dialog.

And from what I can tell, the film seems pretty faithful to both the actual story and also the characterizations of its major players, though I imagine some people will be wondering was von Stauffenberg really the prime mover of the post-explosion activities, as depicted in the movie.

Since this was a Hollywood film, there also had to be some way to transit between German to English language, and this is done early in the film in a sequence that’ll remind viewers of 1990’s The Hunt for Red October. I don’t think a lot would had been necessarily added to the film if all the actors and Cruise had somehow learned and spoke their lines in German for the film, but it’d be interesting to see if one day Operation Valkyrie and the July 1944 bombing plot is made by a German production and crew altogether.

For those of us who love trivia, Mr. Collins in both the 1995 and 2005’s Pride and Prejudice productions are in this show: Tom Hollander, and David Bamber as Hitler. Bamber though looks nothing like the real historical guy. Bruno Ganz in 2004’s Der Untergang retains the best screen performance of Adolf Hitler, ever.

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On the overall, it’s not perfect, but it’s a watchable .