Reacting to DAS BOOT (1981) | Movie Reaction

I saw "Das Boot" for the first time at a midnight showing, in German with English subtitles. I was with my father, who was a US diesel submarine officer. I was worried that I would fall asleep because of the late start time. Just the opposite, I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. Afterwards, my father told me just how accurate the movie was, from food stored in every possible space, to all hands running to the forward compartments during crash dives. One of my best memories of my father from my teen years.

Germans, due to them having been the bad guys, cannot make , are not allowed to make patriotic and heroic movies about war. This leads to them making the absolute best anti-war-movies out there. No heroes, no great stories, no fun, just dark, gritty realism..... War is hell for all involved....

Imagine watching this in a dark movie theater with surround sound...the depth charge attacks were unreal!

This movie shows: There is no heroes, no honor, no good in war. and no sense or victory. War is death, sorrow, violence and loss of humanity. Never forget abou that.A masterpiece.

It says something about the movie that it almost unfailingly manages to captivate the viewers and make them feel with the crew. It gives me hope that a young person can watch a foreign language, 3½ hrs long movie in an era where many lack the patience to watch anything longer than a TikTok video. I remember watching it in the cinema in early 1982, just before my 17th birthday. I had read the novel, so I was prepared for the long stretches of the boredom experienced by the crew. Still, the shocking ending left me in a mood, and when I exited the cinema, it was dark, cold and foggy - it was as if I hadn't left the movie. The memory is still vivid 42 years later.

At the beginning of the movie the nightclub scene seems shocking - by the end you look back and say "oh, that's why they were all acting crazy."

Jürgen Prochnow is so impressive and charismatic as commander.

Greatest submarine movie ever. In fact one the best movies period. the Tension and range of human emotion keep you on the edge.

This is the best submarine movie ever made! It’s amazing how you forget that these were the “bad guys” the further you go in the movie. I’m a retired U.S. Navy submarine sailor and this is such an awesome movie! Remember how Thomsen looked when he came to the bar at the beginning. How red his eyes were and then the CO of this boat’s eyes were just as red when the were trapped on the bottom. So glad you reacted to this for a “best movie ever”! If you want some lighthearted submarine fun, please watch “Operation Petticoat” with Cary Grant and Tony Curtis or “Down Periscope” with Kelsey Grammer. You’ll love them, I promise!

The masks worn by the sleeping sailors are NOT oxygen masks, this is a mistake in the subtitle translation. The original refers to “Kalipatronen”. Various explanations can be found on the internet under terms such as escape breathing apparatus, but in short: The exhaled air is filtered through soda lime (often calcium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide) and the CO2 contained in the air is bound / converted by a chemical reaction. The masks therefore serve to slow down the accumulation of CO2 in the air, as an excessively high CO2 content leads to respiratory distress and at some point becomes life-threatening. I have already seen some other reactions to this movie where viewers have asked questions at this point. For good reason, after all, allocating the little remaining oxygen to sleeping or non-working people makes no sense.

Jurgen Prochnow telegraphs such empathy and sensitivity in his roles—He was the original Duke Leto in Dune, and the emotions he could communicate with a shift of the eye, was greater than some actors could express with a page of dialogue

The scene with the freighter on fire and they didn’t rescue any of the crew came from an incident where German submarines rescues British sailors and British aircraft attacked the submarines. After this, it was a standing order to rescue no sailors. Their luck was with the sea.

At that time, submarines were not able to dive deeper that the activation depth of a depth charge. Those could be set to a depth of up to 270m. Effective radius of the explosion is between 6 and 10 meters. Most submarines sunk because of damage from several charges as opposed to a direct hit. And as to why they didn't flee: below the surface, they could only operate at 8kn speed. Even on surface, they only reached 18kn top speed. The destroyers at that time could reach up to 35kn, so there was no running.

Having been a sailor and spending a lot of time on the north atlantic, this is still one of the most best looking naval movies. Even though it's from 1981, it beats modern, CGI movie dipictions of the ocean. And then the realism and detail they go into. The shipyard that built the actual U-96 built the set of Das Boot. To the same specs as the original boat. Every screw, of gauge, every lamp is as it was on the real thing. And the real captain of U-96 trained the cast and was present as adviser.

The only happy ending that a U-boat crewman got to see was the day the War ended.

And there you have WW2 from the German perspective: all that pain, all that death, all that destruction, all that effort, all for nothing.

Fun fact: the English dub of this movie has most of the actual German actors dubbing themselves in English! So it's much better than a typical dub.

I'm retired US Coast Guard. This movie triggered my PTSD when I saw it in the theaters. It puts you in the flooding confined space with the U-Boat crew. This movie and The Perfect Storm are the closest thing to what I experienced during rescue-at-sea missions. I am gratified by your reaction to the depictions of the heroism displayed by men in peril in the high seas and their determination to save their boat. The cast of this movie received the same psychological therapy as veterans who survived this sort of trauma would. They were also just as afflicted by the experience.

Legend has it that at the first screening of the movie in the US, when they showed the first title card "40,000 German sailors... 30,000 never returned.", the whole theatre broke out in cheering and applause. After the movie finished they all were humbled, silenced and some even cried over the fact that a movie was able to make them root for the 'enemy'. I think that is testament for how well the movie is made. One of the very best... Buchheim, the author of the novel on which the character of Lt. Werner is based, although having other differences with Petersen, the director, praised the movie for it's accurate depiction of how live was on a german u-boat.

I saw this masterpiece as a young man and it's stayed with me for 43 years. Wolfgang Petersen is a genius. All the actors were incredible.