Kills Me Dead

Nothing says Christmas like a good movie about Nazis.

1. I have great fondness for the brief titles at the start of the film. Excellent font choices and as simple as it was, I loved how they changed Walküre into Valkyrie. Words with umlauts! I love German.
2. I’ve obviously been fixating on accents in movies since The Boy In The Striped Pajamas. I have no problem with Tom “Eye patch” Cruise using his natural accent in this film since it’s clearly a purposeful choice. It starts out with Cruise penning a letter to someone, his voice over starting out in German but fading to English because he would not have an accent if speaking in his native tongue. Quick, to the point, effective. It doesn’t take a lot to make the accents make sense within the context of the movie.
3. The trailer is somewhat misleading in letting you think the entire plot of the film revolves solely around Hitler’s assassination, since this particular part of the plot only gets us midway through the film. The movie is really about the larger plan surrounding Hitler’s removal and the implementation of a new government that would be willing to make a deal with the quickly advancing Allied armies and their governments to end the war. The fact that Hitler obviously survived the assassination attempt is clearly not a spoiler, so it was good that they got that out of the way early on and focused instead on the intensely chaotic scramble to seize power from the SS in the small window of opportunity provided by the assassination. The movie was pretty suspenseful throughout but really took it up another notch in the second half because there was so much internal confusion about what they knew, what they didn’t know, and what was just Nazi Party propaganda being put out to further confuse them.
4. Speaking of which, as they attempt to implement their coup, various parts of the reserve army storm into various Nazi administrative buildings to arrest the SS officers within and install new leadership. There’s a hilarious shot of an expansive and solid building with at least a hundred swastika flags flying in its courtyard yet they still felt it necessary to include a subtitle that said “SS Headquarters”. I WOULD NEVER HAVE GUESSED.
5. I thought Bill Nighy was particularly spectacular as General Olbricht, an indecisive Nazi who is too high-ranking not to be able to make the kinds of decisions he needs to be making. I wouldn’t necessarily call him self-serving — Tom Wilkinson’s character General Fromm was far more concerned about remaining non-committal until the last possible second and making sure he came out on the side that was winning — but he was wonderfully feeble and impotent as a commanding officer. He was clearly a case of someone who had been promoted one level higher than his level of competency.
6. We don’t often see the administrative side of war in movies since the battlefield is more exciting on screen, but they did a bang-up job with injecting a lot of action and urgency into the men-behind-the-desks side of things.
7. I think half the cast of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are in this.
8. Tom Cruise is eye-patched and handless in this movie, having sustained injuries during an Allied attack on North Africa at the start of the movie. (The blood encrusted sand around his not-visible eye after the attack was fabulous.) I thought it would be fun and amusing for him to go through the rest of the movie with a hook where his right hand should be but I suppose when taken with the eye patch this would have been a little too silly. It also wouldn’t have given us the hilariously fabulous scene where von Stauffenberg, who has thus far refused to “heil Hitler”, holds out his arm in the required gesture and bares the stump of a wrist where his hand used to be.
9. Something I loved about the trailer was the graphic treatment using the floor plans of the Wolf’s Lair, so I wished that they had used a little bit more of that in the movie in terms of really moving the camera around its hallways and whatnot.
10. Something I love about the Nazis is their attention to detail when it comes to decor. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that cannot have a swastika added to it, be it the tiles on the floor of a pool or a stained glass window. The best thing about the pool tiles was that they were completely unnecessary, as the scene that takes place there could have taken place in a variety of other settings with a similar context.
11. I love how there is always one young German upstart who is looking for quick career advancement and so blows the whistle on someone else who he could have helped and no one would have been the wiser. It was Rolfe in The Sound of Music and I think it was General Fromm’s lackey in this one.
12. I think the guy leading the reserve army was also the guy who was the sympathetic Nazi who Adrien Brody encounters at the end of The Pianist. If so, that guy has played a Nazi on at least seventeen thousand other occasions. It kind of makes me really sad for him.
13. I feel like Hitler should have been crankier the day after D-Day. Obviously he wouldn’t have had the power of hindsight and the ability to recognize the magnitude of what was happening, but still.
14. I’m not overly familiar with the climate of military and national sentiment in Germany since the war, but I’m under the impression that the generations of offspring born to participants in the war generally condemn the actions of their parents (or grandparents) and that it’s very difficult to display a sense of patriotism. I’m not sure if it was just my perception of it, but this movie seems to be taking a less black and white approach to German military history with the idea that not everyone in the German army was a Nazi and that many in the German army were fighting for their country as required while it was the Nazis who had an agenda with the Final Solution and everything related to that. The core group of coup-enablers who try to assassinate Hitler and install a new government are vocal at the start of the film about how they disagree with Hitler ideologically and how you can still be a Good German™ while being in the military. I imagine all this is largely so that the audience can sympathize with characters who are normally on the side we root against in other films, but I just wondered how it related in general to the overall picture of German militarism and the evolution of how current Germans view that past.
15. There’s a guy in this movie credited on IMDB as “Angry SS Officer”. Like that narrows it down.
16. This movie definitely exceeded my expectations.