It will come as no surprise to many of you that this is one of the films I have been most looking forward to this year. I was crushed when they pushed the date to next year and elated when they pulled it back to 2008. Now I’m doubly elated that I was able to catch a sneak preview of the film last night.
I’ve been hearing mixed things about the film and I was delighted to get a chance to make up my mind for myself.
Valkyrie has a lot of things going against it. For one, we all know the ending. You’d have to have flunked out of 8th grade history class twice to not know that Hitler died at his own hand after it was clear that being captured alive was a bad idea for him. Those of us more interested in history knew about the July 20th plot and that Hitler had survived a bomb blast assassination attempt, but I wasn’t aware of how intricate and daring the plan was and how far along the resultant coup actually got. Singer was able to take a story that we all knew the ending to and keep it thrilling.
For two, you sort of have to expect the ending to be a downer. Fortunately, I like downers, so that part of the film didn’t rub me the wrong way at all.
With those two things going against it, it was refreshing to see that Singer was able to tell the story in a pretty economical way. I think the filmmaking was better than the script, to be sure, though. The best moments in the films seemed to come from the interplay of the actors and the construction of the scenes than from the script.
Having said that, I thought that the cast Singer assembled to tell the story was right on target. Each of the characters, regardless of the size of their involvement, had a presence on the screen that made you identify with each of these soldiers as real people. Terence Stamp, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Eddie Izzard and so on. They each breadth fear of discovery into one of the most brazen and daring plots to overthrow a government that came within a hairs breadth of succeeding.
And seriously, the guy they got to play Hitler scared the shit out of me, he looked so right.
There was a lively discussion afterwards about the one thing I think a number of people will be concerned about: the accents (or lack of them) in the film. Personally, I feel like there’s a precedent set in World War II films for directors to cast Nazi’s as Americans and Brits and use their regular accents (if any.) This worked for me in the context of this film, though those I watched the movie with seemed somehow slighted or put out by the idea that Tom Cruise didn’t try to fake an accent of some kind (either German for authenticity or British to match the rest of the cast.) For my money, I felt like an accent on Cruise, though it might have been capable, would have been more distracting than it’s absence. In The Young Lions, Marlon Brando dons a German accent for his portrayal of a sympathetic Nazi and, though the performance was dynamite, it made him feel slightly out of place. I’m fairly sure it would have had the same effect in this movie.
I will admit to being a complete sap for movies about the various resistances in World War II before I say this next thing, but the film had me so wrapped up in the emotion and melodrama of the plot that I was pretty moved by the end of the film.
At the end of the day, this was a fairly tight thriller with a great cast that helps the filmmaker overcome the small weaknesses in the script. (Honestly, though, what can we expect from the guy who brought us that piece of crap “The Way of the Gun”?) It was also a story that I think it would be good for everyone to know. Seriously. Opposing the leader of your country as a matter of national pride is something that people shouldn’t look down on.
Knowing full well that Bryan Singer directed the Usual Suspects, I would say that Valkyrie is his best non-superhero movie, hands down and I really can’t wait to see what he sets his sights on next. I would recommend this to other people and I will certainly be catching it again in the theatre.
This rates an easy 8 out of 10.