(no subject)
Just thought that I would take some time to review the film that I enjoyed far more than I thought I would New Year's Day.
As far as historical accuracy goes, there were only two things which hampered my ability to suspend disbelief: Tom Cruise cannot pull-off playing a Junker and the lines that David Bamber was given were extremely un-Hitleresque--he sounded more like a kindly English gentleman you would like to sit down and have tea with; not like the guy who called Churchill a "fat degenerate"--what we get in Valkyrie is an angstless Hitler and that strikes me as being ahistorical.
Cruises' emotional range was all over the map and it some instances it seems he was playing Colonel Jerry von McGuire, a modern-day sports agent somehow transported back in time and slipped into a Heer uniform. There were times that he was unhinged when his acting should have been subdued and vice-versa, but without actually having a reputable historian on set and on call to coach Cruise, Singer and the screen-writers over what was going through the heads of these men and at what times, such flubbing is to be expected.
2977 officers were executed in the aftermath of the July 20, 1944 plot, ranging in rank from lieutenant all the way up to field marshal. The film's epilogue provides no such figure of how Nazi terror was finally unleashed upon the one part of German society that had been immune to it: the Officer Corps. It also fails to reveal the true extent of Hitler's injuries; he had sustained quite a bit more damage than "scratches" and a few bruises. The Austrian kunatic had to have a couple hundred splinters tweased out of his person.
As far as historical accuracy goes, there were only two things which hampered my ability to suspend disbelief: Tom Cruise cannot pull-off playing a Junker and the lines that David Bamber was given were extremely un-Hitleresque--he sounded more like a kindly English gentleman you would like to sit down and have tea with; not like the guy who called Churchill a "fat degenerate"--what we get in Valkyrie is an angstless Hitler and that strikes me as being ahistorical.
Cruises' emotional range was all over the map and it some instances it seems he was playing Colonel Jerry von McGuire, a modern-day sports agent somehow transported back in time and slipped into a Heer uniform. There were times that he was unhinged when his acting should have been subdued and vice-versa, but without actually having a reputable historian on set and on call to coach Cruise, Singer and the screen-writers over what was going through the heads of these men and at what times, such flubbing is to be expected.
2977 officers were executed in the aftermath of the July 20, 1944 plot, ranging in rank from lieutenant all the way up to field marshal. The film's epilogue provides no such figure of how Nazi terror was finally unleashed upon the one part of German society that had been immune to it: the Officer Corps. It also fails to reveal the true extent of Hitler's injuries; he had sustained quite a bit more damage than "scratches" and a few bruises. The Austrian kunatic had to have a couple hundred splinters tweased out of his person.