I’ve always been baffled by the immense hard-on America has for stories about World War II. I think it says more about our bloodthirstiness as a culture than anything else that we devour depictions of history’s bloodiest war for the sheer entertainment of experiencing the reality and emotion of death.
Valkyrie tells almost no actual history but uses the shorthand of America’s familiarity with Hitler and World War II to tell a story that could not be comprehendible in any other form. No establishment of character or setting is needed. The movie starts and ends as a tale about a plot within the German military to kill Hitler and seize Germany.
This both makes Valkyrie clever and totally shitty. It’s clever because the movie is ultimately about communication – how information travels through ranks and mediators and the truth ends up being whatever the person who won says it was. This is both the thesis of the movie – “We have to show the world that not all of us were like him,” says a particularly acute writer cleverly disguised as Kenneth Branagh multiple times during the movie – and the device which the movie uses to make its point. We frequently see characters struggling to communicate through phones, telegraph, radio, and by overhearing things that they shouldn’t. In the end the truth is less important than the decisions these mediators make, and in that way the people are more powerful than those in charge.
Ugh, if you don’t like obvious metaphors, don’t watch this movie. The protagonist has ONE EYE, for God’s sake, and the movie turns on his inability to consider other perspectives.
It’s shitty because all of the characters are one-dimensional, no-one has any personality, and the central plot point depends on a conspicuous brown briefcase falling over at an opportune moment. It’s a rare movie that seems to be boring by design, because if it wasn’t – if we could root for any of these men – the hypothesis couldn’t make sense, and the power wouldn’t be in mediums of communication but in their charisma. It’s especially notable that Tom Cruise can appear so wooden and unengaging but maybe that’s an achievement for him.
I guess Bryan Singer deserves some credit for making a bunch of famous actors unwatchable just to prove a point. But it’s not a very entertaining movie.
We’re finishing this by New Years, Folks!
Next: Knight and Day
Every Tom Cruise Movie 