Nevertheless, as summer gets into full swing, Das Boot works as a highly entertaining historical thriller. The series does have its fair share of wartime atrocities being committed, resulting in some scenes that are not easy to watch. Based on an autobiographical novel by German World War II photographer Lothar-Guenther Buchheim, Das Boot follows the lives of a fearless U-Boat captain. Those performances accentuate the intrigue and the tension that’s necessary for a story like this to work, balancing the needs of the plot with a more intimate exploration of the immense weight that’s been thrust upon so many of the series’ key characters.Īt eight episodes, Das Boot is a relatively quick binge-watch, but likely not something most viewers will want to take in in a single viewing. In addition, the series offers a number of superb performances from Krieps, Wlaschiha, Caplan, Schiecher, and Kartheiser - who is doing some memorable accent work in his role. With that the scale of the story feels both immense and manageable, as Das Boot works to deliver smaller, more personal narratives that nevertheless have the potential to make a grand impact on the larger framework of the war itself. Greenwood’s presence on the submarine fuels the growing resentment of Hoffmann’s men toward their captain, leading to a conflict within a conflict that underlines what the series does so well: delivering human stories set against the backdrop of World War II. Meanwhile, the maiden voyage of Hoffmann and his new U-612 becomes increasingly tense when he’s directed away from combat to chauffeur Samuel Greenwood (Vincent Kartheiser), a mysterious American businessman interested in circumventing as many laws as possible with regard to turning a profit during wartime, to a secret location. Along the way, Simone’s plot gradually becomes more fraught the closer she gets to Hagen and to Carla, making for a tense back-and-forth that’s not too far removed from the sort of intrigue seen in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows. Soon after Simone comes face-to-face with a member of Carla’s resistance she finds her worldview turned upside down, as the truth about her brother’s secret life (he has a child with a jewish woman concealing her identity by working as a bartender in a German brothel) forces her to engage in the larger conflict in ways that will make use of and potentially compromise her standing as a military translator. Das Boot works primarily by ratcheting up the tension in both its storylines by moving at a remarkably swift pace.
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