timespace coordinates: October – Christmas Eve 1941 harbour of La Rochelle, harbour of Vigo, Strait of Gibraltar
Das Boot (German pronunciation: [das ˈboːt], German: “The Boat”) is a 1981 German submarine film written and directed by Wolfgang Petersen, produced by Günter Rohrbach, and starring Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer, and Klaus Wennemann. It has been exhibited both as a theatrical release and as a TV miniseries (1985), in several different home video versions of various running times, and in a director’s cut version supervised by Petersen in 1997.
An adaptation of Lothar-Günther Buchheim‘s 1973 German novel of the same name, the film is set during World War II and follows German U-boat U-96 and its crew, as they set out on a hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. It depicts both the excitement of battle and the tedium of the fruitless hunt, and shows the men serving aboard U-boats as ordinary individuals with a desire to do their best for their comrades and their country.
During production, Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, the captain of the real U-96 and one of Germany’s top U-boat “tonnage aces” during the war, and Hans-Joachim Krug, former first officer on U-219, served as consultants. One of Petersen’s goals was to guide the audience through “a journey to the edge of the mind” (the film’s German tagline Eine Reise ans Ende des Verstandes), showing “what war is all about”.
Today, the film is seen as one of the greatest of all German films. (wiki)
imdb