Do you see a graphic improvement over DVD release? I ask because my TV display info says 1080p when I play Das Boot DVD on an upscaling player. It simply means the graphic was upscaled, not necessarily in HD.

I agree that the Director's Cut has the best image and sound, but for some bizarre reason I find it to be the more boring of the two. To me it seems to add an extra hour (over the theatrical release) of just the boring parts. The Uncut version fleshes it out for me.

Or maybe I just think 3-1/2 hours isn't long enough for a u-boat movie.
:rotfl2:

I think it's because the Director's Cut was meant to be watched in one sitting, but since the uncut version was originally a TV series, it doesn't bother me if it takes two or three sittings to watch it. I've watched the Director's Cut in one sitting a few times, and by the end, I'm pretty much exhausted and immobilized. A movie with that much water and no intermission? Those cruel bastards! :down:

I make my own intermission with the DC, at the point where the first half of the movie breaks off. Depending on which version I'm watching I either have to flip a disk over or take out one and put in another. So I don't always sit through the entire 3+ hours in one sitting. I have to say, though, it's not the easiest place to leave off watching!

In fact the very first time I watched it (which was the first time I saw Das Boot, ever), I ended up flipping the disk and watching a bit of the second half and it was really all I could do to take it back out and wait 'til the next evening to finish the movie.

The worst part was, at some point in the process of going through the menu I'd ended up in scene selection and even though I tried not to see any of the chapter titles before I got out of it, I did see one titled "Homecoming."

So when they're sitting on the bottom after getting hit at Gibraltar, my best friend happens to call me. Now, she also called me when I was watching the first half of the movie and I'd told her about it and how good it was. And I tell her I'm now watching the second half and my nerves are SHOT because every time I think it can't get any worse for these lads, somehow it does, and now they're really in dire straits. BUT, I say, BUT I accidentally saw the chapter titles and there's one that said "Homecoming" so I've still got my fingers crossed that everything will turn out okay altho it looks really bad right now!

So, you know, you can just imagine how I felt when I finally got to the "Homecoming" chapter and saw how THAT turned out.

I still remember sitting there all happy and then I hear air raid sirens and I was thinking, WTF YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME. After all of that, now this?
:o :stare: :wah:

One of the best movie endings ever, so dramatic.

First time me and my cousin sat down to watch Das Boot, about 7-8 years ago, we didn't know anything about it. It was about 2AM in the morning. Had some sandwiches ordered early on, so we thought we'd sit down and take a peak while we wait on the chow. I remember I was pretty sleepy already at the beginning. But as it progressed, we brewed coffee after coffee, and watched the whole thing just hanging on suspense :DL

Since then it's been one of my favorites and I still watch it regularly :arrgh!:

I've watched the Uncut version so many times that I sometimes put it in my computer and try to guess where each episode ended. By my count it should be every 48 minutes or so, and there are some places where I might even be right.

But I sure wish they would release yet another version - the full-length miniseries with the episode breaks in place.:sunny:

Same here.

I don't even bother to file the DVDs away anymore, I just have them out on a shelf near the TV for easy access.

I don't know when I've ever had a more nerve-wracking first viewing of a film, and I mean that in a good way. I was so involved in their survival... don't know I've ever been happier watching a movie than I was when that boat finally surfaced again. Or more devastated by an ending... watching Der Alte watch it sink after all they'd been through to get her afloat again and get themselves home. It's heartbreaking.

C'est la guerre.

I do find the ending melodramatic. But this is what plagues all German movies about WWII. A gloomy atmosphere and a bad ending is mandatory. It is the only politically correct treatment of WWII there.

Here's part of a review I wrote where I tried to justify the ending:

Das Boot is an allegory for Germany during the second world war. The captain knew that the superiors were wrong and that the mission cannot be accomplished but he followed the orders anyway because he was a good soldier. The scene when the u-boat is trapped at the bottom of the sea after Gibraltar said it all: the chief engineer told Werner that the whole business is madness and that he knew it all along. In the military a soldier cannot do wrong as long as he followed orders. In defeat the blame goes to the commander. Soldiers are only punished for disobedience. However, in the end we see that obedience to a wrong decision is punished anyway. The most common, and futile, argument by the defendants during the Nuremberg Trials was that they were simply following orders. The aftermath of WWII is deeply ingrained in the German psyche and this movie shows it.

The captain isn't entirely innocent, too. He cheered the victories and was zealous in carrying out orders. How can we blame him? I am sure every audience cheered along with the crew at some point in this movie. In any language, the word for "the good guys" is always "us". The perspective of the movie places us right there among the u-boat crew. The captain clearly violated his own conscience and the laws of man when he refused to rescue the sailors. Das Boot put us there and show us that human beings like us, and not some Biblical monsters, are fully capable of carrying out the worst atrocities, if they are put inside a system that shifts responsibility upwards.

Peterson says in the commentary that after the movie premiered internationally, people would ask him why they couldn't just let the crew come home safely. His answer was, "What they didn't understand was, this is a German movie about WWII. It can't have a happy ending."

It would be different now, but in 70's when the movie was made, it was too close to the war to have a happy ending. This was one of the first German postwar movie to portray WW2 German soldiers in a sympathetic light.

Its only now, two generations later, that Germans are allowing themselves to laugh about the war.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/g...rious-basterds

Actually the movie ends the way it does because that's the way the book ends.

I've long said something similar to Frau Kaleun's Petersen quote: It's German, so it's opera.

Just bought the un-cut version, what a difference from the Director's Version which I have as well.