Review of Valkyrie (2008) by Chads. — 26 Dec 2008

The Fuhrer has landed. Leni Riefenstahl must've had the day off. As Adolph Hitler descends from his small plane, it's a guy who's holding the camera. Hitler and his men are in Russia, on official Nazi business one would presume.

But before they confab, there's lunch to consider. The food is ready, but the men wait. Nobody eats until Hitler eats. Movies about Nazi Germany fall in two categories: films with Hitler, and films without Hitler.

"Valkyrie" is a film with Hitler, and quite notably, very scant mention of the concentration camps. It's like a perfect inverse of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List", in which the Jews are dying in the frame, and the only time that the film refers to Hitler, it's the last word Amon Goethe utters before he dangles.

"Valkyrie", thankfully, does not try to humanize the man as Oliver Hirschbiegel's "Der Untergang" did, but the lack of a Jewish presence does humanize the Nazi soldiers. Without the Jews readily made available for random extinguishment, the Nazis seem like ordinary men, especially out of uniform, as in one scene where they occupy hospital beds in the sick ward.

Stauffenberg(Tom Cruise) comes close to being an anti-hero, or worse, the antagonist, in his exhibition of vigilante-like behavior against the Germans. Of course, the Nazi party is synonymous with evil, but in a pop-entertainment such as "Valkyrie", the negation of evildoing actually makes for a more tasteful movie, than if we saw a Jew get shot in the back of the head, in the same filmic universe where Cruise dons an eye-patch like a SS pirate.