U571 (1.0 Money Train)

U571 is a really dumb film. Clearly the director and screenwriter never saw Das Boot or read any history of WWII. I mean:

1. If you take a WWII sub to around 240m, and the pressure gauge red lines at 160m, surely you'll need to hammer some blocks into the leaks that will spring up. (Aside: there was an American nuclear sub that imploded in the sixties. I'm not sure the depth, but it was probably only around 250m.)

2. When they survive these improbably depths the Chief comments "the Germans really know how to make a boat". And yet a German destroyer explodes in a massive fire ball with just one torpedo fired into it. Good German torpedoes, perhaps? Pity the German artillery that hit the sub directly wasn't that good. Maybe only German boats were good, but their ships were crap.

3. And when little Billy is sent into the bilge to stop a leak, he closes off the first, then catches his breath under a grille and talks to the Weapons guy. Now, his air hose isn't long enough. So why not go back to the entry point and re-enter the bilge at the grille where he was talking to the weapons guy. Then he could get enough slack on the air pipe.

4. But the fact remains his arm is shorter than the distance between the valve and the bulkhead (or whatever it was) that stops him. No amount of talking by the captain will change this fact. The only way to close the valve is by:

4a. Sending down someone with longer arms (or perhaps giving Billy a wrench or jemmy),

4b. Or lifting up the floor panels. I mean, why the hell would you have a valve that was impossible to reach except by swimming through the bilge?

4c. Or waiting on the surface getting shot to pieces so the structure fails and little Billy can reach the valve and save the lives of the men that the captain has endangered by sacrificing little Billy in the first place. Basically, the captain should have been court-martialled and Billy given a posthumous VC (hey, they should have been Brits, anyway. The US hadn't even entered the damned war at this point.)

5. Anyway, it was lucky that when they meet the other U-Boat in the storm that the sea only has a half-metre chop. It was so calm they probably could have gotten much closer. And it's also lucky that a US Navy plane finds the life raft (at the end) in the Atlantic when the U-boat action was mainly off the European coasts and so would have been patrolled by the RAF. (Especially considering the Americans hadn't entered the damned war at this point.)

I only saw bits and pieces of this film over two showings, seeing the ending last night, so that's why this dissection is so short. But I did notice they had a technical adviser on the film. At least in the credits. What they needed was:

a. a technical adviser with submarine experience, or b. a five year old.

But speaking of submarine movies, in The World Is Not Enough, Bond has the chance to kill all the bad guys quietly and quickly in the control room of the sub. But instead, he dithers and lets a fight happen, in which he kills them all anyway, making the success of his mission all the more unlikely. What kind of licence to kill has he got? "The bearer of this licence can kill only in self defence and only when hopelessly outnumbered." He's been a good boy and clearly has no conscience. Give him a real licence. "The bearer of this licence can kill anyone at all whenever he feels like it for the security of Great Britain and Northern Ireland." It's like the way George Lucas remastered Star Wars so Han shoots second. Enough of the honourable no-cold-blood-executions crap.

Score: 1 Money Train