There’s No Question: This 1981 War Epic Is the Best Submarine Movie Ever, and Rotten Tomatoes Agrees
With Wolfgang Petersen's meticulous direction, Das Boot is a captivating and terrifying look inside a WWII submarine.
War is brutal, exhausting, and, more often than not, meaningless. That's one key message that Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 World War II picture Das Boot puts across more powerfully than most war movies. But how brilliantly Petersen crafts Das Boot to communicate this message makes the film stand apart in the crowded sea of submarine war movies. Unlike the good company it keeps in movies like The Enemy Below, which personalizes the war to pit Robert Mitchum's British commander Captain Murrell against his German adversary Kapitänvon Stolberg (Curd Jürgens), and U-571, which sacrifices accuracy for action-hero theatrics, Das Boot impresses with its uniqueness—no hero, no melodrama, no soaring music when a torpedo hits its mark, no patriotic speeches about honor and duty. What the movie does, however, is offer a gripping experience of human beings—men, young and old—who could be of any nationality, even though we know they are Germans, fighting a war they didn’t ask for. Throughout the film's runtime, Petersen makes us live alongside this crew. Simply put, Das Boot is the submarine war movie.
