BEFORE: Sticking with World War II, Veteran's Day is Monday so this sets me up perfectly for that. Linking from "Red Tails", Cuba Gooding Jr. was also in "Men of Honor" with David Keith (last seen in "Behind Enemy Lines").
THE PLOT: A German submarine is boarded by disguised American submariners trying to capture their Enigma cipher machine.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Crimson Tide" (Movie #869)
AFTER: Eh, I had high hopes for this one because I love stuff about codes, and the Enigma machine seemed like it would provide a good plot point, but that device really could have been any object, for all the demonstration we were shown in this film. This film got unintentionally spread over two nights, not because it was excessively long, but because once the thing was obtained, I lost interest and fell asleep. That's OK, I built a few extra days into the schedule for just such an occurrence.
This may say a little something about the film, there was some action, which you kind of expect in a war film, but was there enough to hold my interest? Clearly not, at least not at 2 am. There were a lot of tense moments, pretty much everything is tense when characters are 100 meters below the water's surface, in a submarine surrounded by intense water pressure, depth charges and such.
Oh, and it's a German sub, being piloted by an American crew, due to a contrivance or two that puts a skeleton crew of Navy men and a military expert or two in a German vessel. Since the title of the film is "U-571" and "U" stands for "U-boat" (German word for submarine: "Unterseeboot") it wasn't too hard to see this one coming. That was probably the best part, seeing American men trying to understand German and trying to pilot a vessel they were not trained to operate.
Beyond that's, it's another mostly serviceable war film, relying on classic war stereotypes, just as "Red Tails" did. The young lieutenant who wants to command his own vessel, the grizzled crew chief who's been through two wars, and so on.
Also starring Matthew McConaughey (last seen in "Reign of Fire"), Harvey Keitel (last seen in "The Border"), Bill Paxton (last seen in "Tombstone"), Jake Weber (last seen in "Meet Joe Black"), Erik Palladino (last seen in "Can't Hardly Wait"), Will Estes, Terrence Carson, with a cameo from Jon Bon Jovi.
RATING: 5 out of 10 torpedoes
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