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Cruise's Valkyrie blasted as 'Nazi apologia'
Dec 27, 2008, 14:52 GMT
In a country in the grips of evil, in a police state where every move is being watched, in a world where justice and honor have been subverted, a group of men hidden inside the highest reaches of power decide to take action. Tom Cruise stars in the suspense film, VALKYRIE, based on the true story of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (CRUISE) and the daring and ingenious plot to eliminate ...more
Los Angeles - An influential US critic on Friday blasted Tom Cruise's latest movie Valkyrie as a 'Nazi apologia' in the sharpest criticism yet of the WWII thriller.
The movie features the US superstar as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, an aristocratic German who headed a group of top officers who hatched a plot to kill Hitler late in the war.
Roger Friedman, film critic for Fox News, said the movie appeared to intentionally minimize the impact of Nazism.
'I'm concerned that Valkyrie could represent a new trend in filmmaking: Nazi apologia. Not once in Valkyrie do any of the 'heroes' mention what's happening around them. Hitler has systemically killed millions,' said Friedman. 'Valkyrie opens the door to a dangerous new thought: that the Holocaust and all the other atrocities could be of secondary important to the cause of German patriotism.'
Friedman criticized the set designers for minimizing or hiding the swastikas that have become symbols of the evils of Nazism, and blasted the portrayal of Hitler as a 'doddering fool with a British accent and a nice suit.'
Friedman's political criticism of the movie may have been the sharpest of US reviews, but it was far from the only negative assessment.
Writing in the Washington Post, Phillip Kennicott blasted the film's puzzling failure to portray von Stauffenberg's life before his unsuccessful assassination attempt - when he was untroubled by Nazism and served as Hitler's loyal soldier.
Kennicott also criticized the movie for failing to point out that the plot was hatched not out of moral objections to Nazism but only when Germany was facing imminent collapse.
Stauffenberg 'was not a committed anti-Nazi until very late in the game,' wrote Kennicott. 'Many anti-Hitler conspirators weren't so much against Nazism, with its vile racial and militarist policies, as they were against Hitler's disastrous leadership of the war.'
Cruise himself came close to distorting the extent of German support for Hitler and his policies.
'It's important to know that it wasn't everybody - not everybody felt the way [Hitler did] or fell into the Nazi ideology,' Cruise said during the film's US press tour.
'The thing that stood out to me was Stauffenburg himself and the amount of desperation and pain for him,' Cruise said. 'He wanted a moral country that participated in the world, not one of annihilation and Holocausts and world domination. He was a man who was able to see through all the propaganda and see how utterly insane Hitler was, and ultimately he was the one to say, 'Somebody's got to shoot that bastard.''
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Older Talkback
page: 1
These reviewers are so over the top that it looks like they have an 'agenda'. I saw the movie and was both informed and entertained. All in all, it is a good movie.
I think it's deceptively easy to sit here in a democracy and moralize about the decisions of German soldiers over 50 years ago. Was Hitler twisted and evil? I don't think anyone is arguing that. But as Cruise tried to say in his remarks, not every member of the Nazi party or the German military were genocidal maniacs. And just because Stauffenberg was 'a loyal soldier' doesn't mean he agreed with everything Hitler stood for.
We have to remember that our own personal and social filters do not apply directly to 50+ years ago. What I mean is that anytime you look at history you must never try and judge actions based on your own time and place. You must always remember that these events happened within a specific social and political and therefore the actions of these people cannot be so simply judged just because it doesn't make sense within the framework of 2008.
It's just too easy to pass sentence on individuals because they didn't do it the way we think they should have. They still *did* do it, even knowing failure would be a death sentence. How many of these critics would do the same?
Oh, and by the way, what do they mean the swastika was minimized? I recall a forest of red flags bearing the symbol outside the SS HQ. I recall a 30 foot swastika inlaid in the tile of an Olympic sized swimming pool that was the focus of one scene's opening shot.
Not enough holocaust references? The opening scene does have Stauffenberg mention this in a journal entry. And later he mentions shutting down the death camps as one of the first things to do once the new government took over. But the movie wasn't about his opposition to the death camps or the required use and display of the swastika. It was about a plot to kill Hitler and end the war. Could we please review a movie for the movie's actual subject and not all the things it *wasn't* about?
Thank you. The soapbox is now available. :-)
I could go on for thirty or more pages on this subject, but I'll just give you a brief of my conclusions about Valkyrie's criticism:
Did anyone here vote to impeach Bush and his inhumane policies? Was he thrown out of office because of them? I didn't think so. Stop saying Herr von Stauffenberg acted too late when you NEVER acted at all!
German antisemitism wasn't any worse than any other European nation's antisemitic persecutions. Thing were done in England and in Spain amongst others, in order to get rid of Jews, that would rival Auschwitz any day. Make your hair curl!
It's history. Just look it up.
I think Cruise does resemble Graf von Stauffenberg a lot. Physically, I mean.
I also think Cruise was the worse choice imaginable to represent someone who has to appear (and who was) ideologically or morally credible.
Cruise has garnered an image as the most perverse kind of vacuous dipshit imaginable. What the hell is he doing in a role where he represents ... aww forget it.
And that's what riles me the most. Critics now nibble at the real WWII heroes who tried to bring down Hitler, because they don't fit into their little image of what an absolute WWII hero-victim should be. They don't want to lose their 'poor little Jew Ann Frank' image. It's so sellable!
Oooh!
And now they're helped along by Cruise, the very prince of vacuousness.
You can't reduce a whole race to a stereotype of slimy underhanded profiteering pigs, anymore than you can reduce a nation to an image of killers looking for vindication.
Nobody mentioned that Stauffenberg was a Graf. A Count. He was from the waning military nobility in Germany; somewhat comparable to the von Trapps in Austria. So were some of his co-conspirators.
A dozen years before the events depicted in this movie, Claus Graf Shenk von Stauffenberg and a few colleagues guarded the tomb of a religious leader buried in Switzerland, against the Nazis who wanted appropriate him, his body, his legend. They did succeed in appropriating his rendition of the Tantric swastika. They never got his body.
Anybody tell you about the Graf's all-night vigils in the Swiss cemetery?
I didn't think so...
Rommel dutifully fell on his sword. He was a true aristocrat.
They became the Widerstand. They failed. They did not try to save just a few Jews, they tried to save Germany and humanity. They were true nobility. They were aristocracy. They were humanists. Their mission was not to save Jews. They tried to save Germany and humanity.
Some dipshits are trying to turn this against them and pass this movie off as revisionist history.
WHO ARE YOUI to accuse anyone of revisionist views?
You should keep on reviewing stupid comedies. Focus on the deeper meaning of some asshole pretending he has some of his own sperm hanging off his ear, but don't tackle anything above your station, you bozos!
Spitfire
I watched this film and totally disagree. The people are plotting to take down Hitlet because they dispise the Fuhrer. It is mentioned in the film that if the plot to bring down Hitler succeeds then they would immediatley shut down the concentration camps and order negotiations with the allied forces. I feel the films explores an area of the war most know little about, and it did a good job at is also. The Fox News reviewer must have watched a different film or is just an extremely narrow minded person.
Valkarye what critiscism was there for this film
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tio tonyDec 27th, 2008 - 20:58:22
I think we have a little over anylization here. It's just a movie.
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