[TH0R]

Originally Posted by Nisgeis

Requirements of film massively outweigh anything else due to broadcast standards. It wouldn't have mattered if the U-Boats were painted sky blue pink, with tartan, if it didn't look good on film, it wouldn't have been shot that way. The human eye has an amazing HDR, the camera does not.

You're forgetting that even the author of 'Das Boot' had series criticisms of the film and... well, he was there! Whose word would you take in that case - someone who was there or someone who wasn't?

Bottom line... Das Boot is not a historical document, it's an entertainment product to entertain us. Nothing more. You cannot draw inference of reality from things depicted in it.

Criticism by novel author Buchheim

Buchheim himself was a U-boat correspondent. He has stated that the following film scenes are unrealistic:
In the film, an unidentified member of the crew throws an oil-stained towel into Lt. Werner's face. As a Lieutenant, Werner would have commanded special respect and in reality, the culprit would have been court-martialed and received a hefty sentence.
The crew behaves far too loudly during patrols; the celebrations after getting a torpedo hit were described as unprofessional. For example, after surviving a bombing, the crew celebrate loudly in their bunks, even with a sailor dressing up as a woman in a red-lit room.

Even though overwhelmed by the literally perfect technological accuracy of the film's set-design and port construction buildings, novel author Lothar-Günter Buchheim expressed great disappointment with Petersen's adaptation in a film review[3] published in 1981, especially with Petersen's aesthetic vision for the film and the way the plot and the effects are, according to him, overdone and clichéd by the adaptation. As well he criticised the hysterical over-acting of the cast, which he called highly unrealistic, while acknowledging the cast's acting talent in general. Buchheim, after several attempts for an American adaptation had failed, had provided a script detailing his own narrative, cinematographical and photographical ideas as soon as Petersen was chosen as new director. It would have amounted in full to a complete 6-hour epic; however Petersen turned him down because at the time the producers were aiming for a 90-minute feature for international release. Ironically, today's Director's Cut of Das Boot amounts to over 200 minutes, and the complete TV version of the film to roughly 5 hours long.

Buchheim attacked specifically what he called Petersen's sacrificing of both realism and suspense in dialogue, narration, and photography for the sake of cheap dramatic thrills and action effects (for example, in reality one single exploding bolt of the boat's pressure hull would have been enough for the whole crew to worry about the U-boat being crushed by water pressure, while Petersen has several bolts loosening in various scenes).

Uttering deep concerns about the end result, Buchheim felt that unlike his clearly anti-war novel the adaptation was "another re-glorification and re-mystification"[3] of the German WWII U-boat war, German heroism and nationalism. He called the film a cross between a "cheap, shallow American action flick"[3] and a "contemporary German propaganda newsreel from World War II".[3]