Das Boot (1981) Review: The War Inside a Steel Tube

Is Das Boot worth watching?

Yes. Das Boot is one of the great war films, a relentlessly tense submarine drama that makes the audience feel every metre of depth and every hour of waiting. Wolfgang Petersen confines almost the entire story to the cramped interior of a German U-boat, and the result is as much a study of fear and endurance as an action film. The reservation is that the long stretches of boredom it depicts are part of the design, so viewers expecting constant combat may find the first hour slow.

What is Das Boot about?

In the autumn of 1941, a German U-boat sets out from occupied France on patrol in the Atlantic. On board is a young war correspondent, Lieutenant Werner (Herbert Grönemeyer), sent to report on the heroic submariners he has read about in propaganda. What he finds is a crew of exhausted young men under a seasoned, sardonic captain (Jürgen Prochnow), who has lost any illusions about the war and its leaders. Weeks of monotony, storms and cramped living give way to sudden, terrifying encounters with Allied destroyers.

Das Boot is adapted from Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s novel, drawn from his own experience as a correspondent aboard a U-boat. It is a West German production in German, directed by Petersen, and the theatrical version runs 149 minutes. A director’s cut of well over three hours followed in 1997, but the shorter version is a complete and powerful film in its own right.

Petersen turns a corridor into a battlefield

The film’s great achievement is spatial. The U-boat is a narrow steel tube crammed with pipes, bunks, torpedoes and hanging sausages, and Jost Vacano’s handheld camera races through it at head height, squeezing through hatches with the men. After a while the audience knows the layout as well as the crew does, which is exactly why the attack sequences are so frightening: there is nowhere to go.

Sound does as much work as image. The ping of enemy sonar, the groan of the hull under pressure and the sudden crack of rivets shooting loose are more unnerving than any explosion. Klaus Doldinger’s pulsing theme is used sparingly, so silence becomes the film’s main source of suspense. Das Boot received six Academy Award nominations, including for Petersen’s direction and Vacano’s cinematography, a rare haul for a foreign-language film at the time.

A crew, not a cast of heroes

Prochnow’s captain is the film’s anchor, a weary professional whose contempt for Nazi officialdom is clear from the opening scenes. He is brave, capable and increasingly worn down, and Prochnow plays him with minimal gestures and a face that carries the strain of every depth charge. Klaus Wennemann as the chief engineer and Grönemeyer as the watchful outsider give the film its other key perspectives.

Crucially, the film humanises the crew without excusing the cause they serve. These men are grimy, frightened and often childish, and their suffering is real. But Petersen never lets the audience forget what the war is for or what their torpedoes do, and one of the film’s most haunting moments comes from seeing the other side of an attack.

Where the long patrol tests patience

The theatrical cut has one weakness: beyond the central trio, many of the crew blur together, and the compression from a much longer story is felt in characters who register as faces rather than people. The deliberate monotony of the early patrol, while essential to the film’s effect, will also test viewers used to modern war films that stage combat every few minutes. Choose the original German soundtrack with subtitles over the English dub; the performances lose a great deal in translation.

Who should watch Das Boot?

It is essential viewing for fans of war films and of pure suspense cinema, and for anyone who wants a war story told without flag-waving. Set aside two and a half hours and watch with the lights down and the sound up. There is combat violence and frightening peril, but little graphic gore; the most intense element is the sustained claustrophobia, which some viewers find genuinely distressing.

Two German war films that make natural companions:

• All Quiet on the Western Front, Edward Berger’s harrowing First World War adaptation, which shares Das Boot’s unsparing view of young men used up by war.
• Downfall, a later German reckoning with the war, set among the leadership rather than the men who fought for it.

The verdict

Das Boot is a masterclass in tension and one of the most honest war films ever made, a story that finds its drama in fear, fatigue and the fragility of a steel hull. A few underdeveloped crew members aside, it remains overwhelming more than four decades on.

Rating: 4.5/5