A short DVD/film review:
I recently purchased a copy of “Das Boot” on DVD: this is an excellent film and the plot is described on Wikipedia. There are a number of different versions going around, including the ‘short’ 2 hours 30 minutes cinema version, the “Director’s Cut”, running to 3 hours 36 minutes and, further, a TV mini-series in six parts. This TV series has been re-cut into single, continuous whole film, running to almost 5 hours. That’s the version I got. 🙂
The longer versions of the film actually have longer periods of “not much happening”, which were presumably the bits cut out for the shorter versions: however, strangely, the longer periods of quiet add hugely to the atmospherics of the film. A journey on a U-boat, after all, would likely have been many days of inactivity, followed by a series of fairly short encounters with the enemy.
The DVD has two language tracks, in the original German and dubbed into English; subtitles are also available in many languages, including English. So, when I watched through the whole thing over two or three evenings last week, I watched it in German with English subtitles. Keeping the original dialogue seemed like the best way to retain the feel of the film. Actually, I found out afterwards that even in the English dubbed version, the voices are almost without exception those of the original actors, i.e. English with a strong German accent, which would probably have been quite watchable.
Geeky anachronism: One thing I spotted was that the Enigma encoding machine they had on board was a 4-rotor version; these didn’t become available until 1942, yet the film was set in late 1941. They would have had a 3-rotor machine. 😉