Review of Downfall (1997) by Brandon W — 07 Feb 2017

Downfall, or Der Untergang in German, is directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, and it stars Bruno Ganz and Alexandra Maria Lara in a historical war drama about the final days of Adolf Hitler during World War II and how Germany went into surrender to Russia forces.

I remember when I first known about this film, and that's from YouTube when they show many Hitler parodies that play this movie with Hitler complaining about something when the translation is about something else that's recent news in a hilarious way.

I would've got the chance to watch Downfall again in Holocaust class, but we didn't have enough time to watch it, so we watch something else. Luckily for me however, I managed to find it on Netflix, and watch it at a later time, which is now, and even when watching so many of those parodies, I still find it to be a tense film that I took it serious.

I saw one of the comments that ask why are the parodies so successful that has been running for more than 5 years, and when I saw one of the answers, I agree with it, which is that the acting is so real and haunting, especially from Bruno Ganz that eerily looks similar to Adolf Hitler and is fantastic in it that feels.

mentally frightening towards his thinking process, that whenever someone puts in translations to them that have nothing to do with the film, it makes it feel like the actors were actually talking about that which makes it hilarious, even though it's not the case to what they're really saying.

The writing by Bernd Eichinger is very strong at keeping the viewers invested in the film, even if for us in the United States and other countries besides Germany, we have to read the translations. Everybody knows about the characters for what they have done that made history, but seeing in this film from how they act towards the end of World War II, there are some deeper characteristics from them that we might've not quite seen, even from Hitler who is starting to have some human qualities to him, although not that much to the point that we misunderstand him as a person consider that we see a lot of horrific things from his mentality that makes him what we remember him by.

With a film like this, it's so easy to portray the characters so evil that they'll do things that will be shocking to viewers, especially since it takes place during the last days of World War II, but all it shows is that they remain faithful and loyal to Hitler, while questioning him at the same time and are actually starting to care about the German citizens and want to protect them instead of themselves, even though Hitler doesn't have the same thought as them.

Downfall is probably one of my favorite foreign films, and if it wasn't for the Hitler parody videos on YouTube, I probably wouldn't have heard of this movie.