Jeff Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere has offered up a fantastic way to make Valkyrie a much better film, “[Tell] the story of Cruise’s Col. Claus von Stauffenberg as a realistic wish-fulfilment fantasy… Show Hitler being killed by the briefcase bomb, the subsequent coup d’etat succeeding, the Nazi higher-ups fleeing for their lives, a truce being struck between the new German government and Allied forces, and Russian troops agreeing to stand down and not invade Berlin.”
Embargoes are still up on Valkyrie reviews as far as I know, but I will say the best part of the film is the second half and had they made the second half bleed more into the first half and gone down the road Wells suggests it would have been a phenomenal idea. One thing about a couple of this year’s WWII films is they are going against the norm. The Reader dealt with German guilt following the war while Good (review coming soon) dealt with the Germans before the war. Valkyrie follows suit, but it also carries that one thing that I even heard a couple of people talking about heading into my screening, “Well we know they don’t kill Hitler…” Just imagine if they had!
One of my most hated statements when people talk about Titanic is, “I already knew how it was going to end, the boat sinks.” Well no shit Sherlock, if that is your approach to film you must have a grand ol’ time every time you sit down in the cinema. I would have loved to see the faces on all the naysayers had the Titanic actually pulled into port in Cameron’s #1 box-office hit, but that wouldn’t have really worked in that instance, but how about this…
How about a film about the 2000 Presidential election and having Al Gore actually come out victorious? What if Jay Roach’s Recount ended with the Supreme Court had ordered the recount to continue and finding Gore had actually won leaving Florida’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris disgraced and in court facing charges of unethical behavior followed by the swearing in of Gore and the disappearance of George W. Bush from the political map. So much of our movies are fictional outings anyway, why not jumble it up a bit?
As for Valkyrie, there is more to the story, of course, but I will explore that in my review. I just thought this was too interesting to be left unsaid.
