This movie is so far below awful, it defies description. I thought that U-571 was the worst, but, compared to this, U-571 rates a very strong 10.
Let's start with the German side of the picture, shall we? The movie starts somewhere in the vicinity of Kiel, in Shleswig-Holstein. The German being spoken and written is Bavarian German. The two dialects are about as far apart as the Deep South and Bostonian English. They can't be further apart if they tried and, usually, cannot be understood by each other. That pretty much ends the German involvement in the film.
The C-47 has a bomb sight (?!). The pilot and co-pilot are flying without benefit of headsets. The co-pilot has a bullet hole in his forehead while he struggles with an inept Japanese soldier trying to bayonet him in the throat. The Japanese soldier survives being shot. The pilot knows how to repair radios. Does the stupidity of this movie ever end?
The remainder of the film centers around a small handful of American sailors. We see officers, both flag rank and commanding officers, wearing neatly groomed beards, something never done during WWII. We see one officer playing poker with the Chief and other enlisted and losing his shirt in the process. Uh, officers fraternizing with enlisted? And this officer is referred to as only "Officer" Cutter. What kind? What rank? For that matter, no one else wears any insignia of rank other than the admiral and Executive Officer Roitman. And he's wearing the insignia of an ENSIGN, the lowest officer rank. The Chief (why aren't there other Chiefs on board?) regularly pops off at officers and even slugs one. He's also under foot during Battle Stations Torpedo instead of being Diving Officer, as would normally be the case. The Captain goes ashore AND STAYS THERE! The rubber "raft" has a rigid hull.
The periscope goes up and down much too slowly. This is not a good thing. The feather attracts attention. The "destroyers" look much more like corvettes. The exterior shots of the hull show rivets, not a welded hull. Torpedoes come out of the same tube or the wrong tube. The Pharmacist's Mate, a pill pusher, performs an amputation -- shall we go on? The crowning touch to this farce of a movie is when the boat is at 350'. The fans are off, rigged for quiet, and the crew is up and about carrying on as if nothing wrong was happening. They should have been in their racks, stripped to the waist and drenched in sweat.
One more thing -- US submarines of that era were named after denizens of the deep, not some made-up mythical creature.
If I were still on the boats, I would consign this piece of dreck to the TDU and drop it to the ocean floor.
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