Das Boot was the first movie I watched on DVD (two weeks after buying my computer I realized--hey! this has a DVD player!). The director's cut is long but worth the patience, as it vividly captures the claustrophobia, boredom and sudden bursts of terror of sub warfare. Jurgen Prochnow is mesmerizing as the sub captain, and the final hour is as intense as it gets.

Petersen does a great job of putting you in the sub. It helped that he forced his actors to stay indoors while filming to maintain that authentic pallor, and insisted on not cutting up the sub set, forcing the cameramen into the same tight spaces that the actors were in, achieving a real sense of the claustrophobia that must accompany submariners perpetually.

The length of the film could be cause for some restlessness, but Petersen uses it to great effect. One feels a real sense of how for these people the war amounted to long periods of suffocating boredom, punctuated by flashes of intense action. Petersen strikes just the right balance of letting the dry moments linger just up until we start counting the bolts, so we get a sense of it, then diving (if I may say) back into the story.

The setting of Das Boot makes it easier, I think, to accept the Germans as simply soldiers and not Nazis (and some, of course, are not Nazis). There is an undercurrent of distance and separation among the crew from the rest of the war; they seem to see themselves almost as free actors, fighting because that's what they do, not because of some cause. And because they are so far from Central Europe, we are removed from the horrors perpetuated there, in what almost seems like a different war.

The ending brings it back, of course, and in a very stark way; I know I could feel my loyalties dividing. It's an unsettling but powerful moment.