A World War II submarine adventure of a sort that already seemed outdated as of, oh, twenty-five years previous — roughly the date of that sympathetic Hollywood portrait of the embittered, weary, but still cunning U-boat commander: The Enemy Below. The main idea of how to rise above the war-movie cliché is to push biological awareness to new heights of realism, and hence the lavish attention paid to excretory function, sweat, snot, vomit, body odor, beards, venereal disease, mildew, and the like. Yet, for all its dogged pursuit of a kind of wincing, teeth-gritting, nose-holding realism, the movie takes a better turn whenever it approaches the frou-frou and hocus-pocus of Old Hollywood studio filmmaking. There are several gorgeous skies, featuring a variety of colors and cloud configurations. There are wonderful views through the ship's periscope, with waves sloshing across the lens like the suds in a front-loading washer at the laundromat. There is some good work done with wind machines and wave machines in front of some rather obvious rear-screen projection. And there is some good miniature work of the toy-boat-in-a-bathtub type, with many marvelous surfacings and submergings. Starring Jurgen Prochnow; directed by Wolfgang Petersen. (1981) — Duncan Shepherd
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