Das Boot Wednesday, Sky Atlantic
Martin Clunes: Islands Of America Tuesday, ITV
(Have had enough of these travelogues. Can’t even raise sufficient energy to think about stars)
Shtisel Netflix
Rating: 
Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened Netflix
Rating:
The classic German war film Das Boot was first released in 1981 and offered a harrowingly detailed account of one German U-boat’s doomed mission during World War II. You are confined with the men on the boat almost exclusively.
It is claustrophobic. Terrifying. Tense. It is the closest you will ever get to being in real submarine combat. It is an incredibly moving testament to the futility of battle. It received six Oscar nominations which, for a foreign-language film, was unprecedented.
Yet at no point down the years has anyone said that what it has always lacked is the addition of a land-based, so-so storyline to include sexy ladies. I have researched this, at some length, and failed to find that mentioned anywhere.
Philip Birnstiel in the new Das Boot. Sadly you do have to wonder what the point is. It shares too much with the classic film for the film to be put aside, or for this to count as a proper sequel
This big-budget, multilingual, eight-part re-boot of Das Boot opened with a double episode and is set nine months after the film’s cataclysmic ending. Here the story is bifurcated, so we’re following a new submarine – the U162 – in tandem with French Resistance happenings above the water. The U162 is mostly crewed by rookies as it’s all the Germans have left. (The Enigma code has been broken but they don’t yet know it.)
The crew spends the night before the boat’s launch (from La Rochelle, in occupied France) getting drunk and bedding prostitutes. They did the same in the film, but while that felt fuelled by the fear and desperation of men who might never return, this felt as if it were fulfilling some kind of naked, sexy lady count. One, two, three…? Stop there? One more for the pot? OK.
There is even a scene where a topless woman is incidentally viewed soaping herself, and I mention this not to be a bore, even though I so often am, but because there could so easily have not been a scene where a topless woman is incidentally viewed soaping herself. It furthers the narrative how?
And it’s not the only thing that is soapy. The characters, to the extent they are distinguishable, are either goodies or baddies – I think we all spotted that the Criminal Inspector was a bad ’un from the off – while the script often jarred with modernisms. Would anyone have said ‘get a room’ in 1942?
Admittedly, the dread on the submarine and the cramped conditions and the heat and the sweat and those suspenseful moments waiting to see if the depth charges would land were well achieved, but hadn’t that all been borrowed from the film?
As for the land-based story, here we’re focused on Simone Strasser (Vicky Krieps), a translator for the Germans who is being forced into helping the Resistance. But the plot is full of holes. Or, if not that, then attention to detail is most wanting. For instance, when she has to bring her younger brother his personal effects before he heads out as the U-boat’s radio operator? But then later, she goes for the first time to where he had lived? Wouldn’t she have been there already? To pick up those effects?
It is ably performed, and you can see money has been thrown at it, but you do have to wonder what the point is. It shares too much with the film for the film to be put aside, or for this to count as a proper sequel or to stand in its own right. But I wish it luck and bon voyage and, if you’re in it for the sexy ladies, I’m sure there are more to come. Strip ahoy!
I had intended also to review Martin Clunes: Islands Of America but it now occurs to me that you all know the drill when it comes to these travelogues and there’s nothing new to say. It’s just another affable celebrity being put in front of stuff so that the celebrity might say ‘It’s beautiful’, although Clunes does sometimes vary that with, ‘It’s beautiful… wow!’ So, instead, I’ll direct to you two Netflix crackers.
One is Shtisel, a family drama that covers the usual family-drama ground – love, betrayal, grief, etc – but is set amid ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem. You will care about all the characters and it is fantastically involving, so much so I watched all two seasons, which amounts to 24 episodes in, ahem, a matter of days. (What can I tell you? When I’m not ranting about sexy ladies I find I have time on my hands.)
The other is the documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. This is about the ‘elite’ musical festival where punters were sold a fantasy involving the Bahamas and supermodels and jet-skis and great acts, but when they arrived the villas were sodden tents, there was no food or water or decent sanitation, the acts had been cancelled and there was no way to get home. Watching the disaster unfold is horribly gripping. And also: just like Brexit, maybe.