![]() Through this movement, we get a sense of the confined quarters, which is how Petersen can evoke the hellish conditions. Sometimes the camera moves so quickly, in movements so deft, that it seems to have a mind of its own. He created a camera especially for the film, one that allows an operator to careen from one end of the ship to another. We would not feel the raw power of Das Boot without Petersen’s cinematographer Jost Vacano. It is because, through Petersen’s direction, life on a submarine is hell on earth. But we come to care about the characters, anyway, not just because they talk fondly about their girlfriends and wives back home. Only the first watch officer (Hubertus Bengsch) is a true believer, and most of the crewmates treat him with mild annoyance and thinly-veiled contempt. Indeed, the characters barely mention Hitler, and all the swastikas are discreetly hidden in their uniforms. Jürgen Prochnow plays the Captain, a weary veteran who has a low opinion of the Nazi high command. Has there ever been a successful war film in the United States that so resolutely focused on the enemy’s point of view? In adapting the novel by Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Petersen sidesteps around the political realities of the situation. That focus on character is important to Das Boot, Petersen’s World War II submarine thriller, which is ironic because they are all Nazis. He got us to care about the characters first. ![]() Action audiences nowadays are taught to be jaded, to react only to the most daring physical feats, and Petersen was always more traditional than that. In Air Force One, arguably Petersen’s greatest success, Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman chew through the scenery in an absurd hijacking premise, and yet it is convincing (in the moment, anyway) because they never once act like they know they are in a movie. Most of his films were sincere and ridiculous, often in the same moment, leading to a kind of melodrama where the audience had no choice but to get emotionally involved. In an age where action films drip with self-awareness and irony, when the mere appearance of Ryan Reynolds signals you should not take them seriously, Petersen’s approach to the genre is out of fashion. When Wolfgang Petersen passed away earlier this August, a certain kind of action film went away with him.
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