Great Films You May Not Have Seen – Downfall

Or ‘Der Untergang’ or ‘Hitler gets his Xbox Live Account banned’

It’s a German film about the last days of Hitler in the Führerbunker. But what makes this film so spectacular is that they’ve really tried not to dramatise it at all, making the events that occurred as accurate and realistic as possible.

Hitler is shown in one moment to be compassionate to his female cooks and his secretary Traudl Junge, but in the next moment telling his generals that the German people can suffer and he will go ahead and destroy all the power supplies in Berlin. Bruno Ganz who plays the lead spent 4 months studying him and his distinct Austrian accent and it’s widely agreed as the most accurate and best depiction of the monster who was really just one man, albeit a despicable and deplorable man.

This movie deserves a watch and it also deserves your full attention. It’s just wonderful that a film can be made in today’s 5-second attention span without the need to over dramatise events. Just show what actually happened and let the audience be the judge.

I warn you, the film is a lot more powerful than you’re expecting it to be. And Magda Goebbels was truly a loathsome women for what she did to her 6 children. How anyone could do what she did is beyond comprehension.

The trivia on IMDB is fascinating. Bruno Ganz turned down the role of Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List. That would have been pretty ironic if he’d taken it.