“They’re killing people.”

      It seems to come as a pretty big surprise to Colonel Claus Von Stauffenberg (Sebastian Koch) when he discovers that his boss, Adolf Hitler, might not be that nice of a guy.  He hears reports, in 1943, of German troops engaging in what basically amounts to genocide.  And he is shocked!  Despondent!  Hitler is condoning this?  Stauffenberg has been a colonel in the German army since the war began, and only now is he hearing reports of what the Nazis are actually all about?  It appears as though Operation Valkyrie wants to make the case that it’s Stauffenberg’s outrage over the genocide and evil of Hitler that leads him to attempt to assassinate the Fuhrer.

     Of course, the movie is pretty much sticking to the real story, so they also throw in the fact that Hitler is ordering the German armies to keep going through Russia when the cold and hunger is killing them by the thousands in a war they can’t possibly win.  And that has something to do with Stauffenberg’s plan as well.  But really, we don’t get to see too much of the plan.  Or too much of the man.  Or too much of anything.  Really, this movie plays more as a documentary than it does as a compelling feature film.  Stauffenberg loves his wife.  He loves Hitler.  Then he finds out Hitler is a bad man.  Five years later.  He decides Hitler must die.  He attempts to assassinate him.  He fails.  He is executed.

     At no point does Koch’s Stauffenberg seem compelling or interesting.  We don’t get to know him at all, and we know from the very beginning that he will be executed for his part in the plot.  So there is little drama in the thing.  And there are already documentaries about this out there, which are better than this film.  For example, The Top Secret Trial of the Third Reich came out recently, which told the same story featuring real archival footage, which made it much cooler than this.  The story remains an interesting one, but the movie isn’t.  I hate to say this, because I am not a big Tom Cruise fan, but you’re better off renting his film.

     Operation Valkyrie comes out June 16th from Alliance Films.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 4:00 am and is filed under 2004, Drama, Foreign, Germany, Historical, Jo Baier, Sebastian Koch, True Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.