My faith in Bryan Singer has been shaken since Superman Returns, a long winded and overly sentimental tribute to Richard Donner’s contribution to the canon. As directors advance further in their career, they tend to get more control over their work, and if their films appear to progressively slip from their promising early work, like The Usual Suspects for instance, it can shake your faith in their abilities.
Beyond my cynicism towards Bryan Singer himself, my disinterest in seeing Valkyriewas compounded by the fact that it was hard to get behind a movie about an army everyone despised trying to accomplish an assassination that everyone knows failed.
Valkyrietells the true story of the last known attempt by the German army to assassinate Adolph Hitler. Tom Cruise stars as Claus von Stauffenberg, a bitter one-eyed colonel in the German army who is recruited by the German resistance to carry out this assassination. His confederates are surprisingly numerous and come from many different walks of life, including soldiers, officers, and members of the aristocracy. The idea is that they will kill Hitler, concoct a story about the SS staging a coup, allowing them to call up the reserve army to secure key military and government installations in Berlin, thereby seizing power. Despite the fact that most people are aware that Hitler died by his own hand in a bunker at the end of the European side of the second World War, Valkyrie is powered by a constant feeling of tension over whether the plot will succeed and whether Stauffenberg and his confederates will be caught.
For me, based on my early impressions, it all hinged on how they bridged the language gap. In the trailers, Tom Cruise wasn’t even speaking with a European accent, let alone a German one. If they were trying to go for authenticity, they failed before they even got started. In the end, in the actual film they managed to jump that hurtle in a relatively effective fashion by starting with Cruise speaking German in his head as he writes in his journal, along with subtitles, and the German slowly turns to English as the subtitles disappear. So they basically play off German as English throughout the film, and it works pretty well… except: there’s a scene in a nightclub where a lady is singing to a crowd in German. Look Bryan, I don’t care how much so-called authenticity it brings to the picture, if you’re switching up German for English, you gotta do it all the way. This is a small, forgivable error, and more of a pet peeve of mine than anything.
So what did I think? I really liked it – I found myself leaning forwards on the couch twitching to see how things were going to play out. The casting was great too, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson and Terrence Stamp were all on board. The one problem is that there were too many obstacles to overcome to bring me in to see it. I can only hope that my latecoming encouragement might get you off your duff to check it out. Think of it like this, picture the worst boss you’ve ever had, multiply him by a million – then picture you and your co-workers getting together to kill him or her and take over your place of business.
The Blu-ray and DVD release are loaded with special features, including featurettes about the making of the movie and a short documentary about the actual July 20 plot, and commentaries from Singer, Cruise, and other experts as well. Singer makes movies for a reasonand he’s more than happy to share that reason, he tends to take a philosophical approach to filmmaking. The DVD and Blu-ray also come with a digital copy to take with you.
The Verdict:
