Valkyrie comes to us after months and months of behind-the-scenes trouble to do with distribution and the like. Not a very good thing when the studio is United Artists, which was recently revived by star Tom Cruise. There's little doubt that Valkyrie, with all its pandering to mass appeal, won't make a decent profit. But as a whole it continues an annoying trend of movies which make a decent amount of money at the box office but are ultimately pretty average in spite of being enjoyable.
Based on actual events during World War II, Valkyrie tells the story of the fifteenth and last plot by the German Resistance to kill Adolf Hitler. After a failed attempt, the Resistance recruit German officer Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) who believes in his country but not Hitler's reign. And after losing his left eye and right hand he decides to take the risk and join the Resistance to help them plan another assassination.
Unlike the recent WWII set film Defiance, Valkyrie makes no bones about the fact that the characters are simply going to speak in English instead of German. It starts off with Cruise's Stauffenberg writing in his diary, thinking in German about what he's writing. But similar to The Hunt for Red October it soon transitions from German to English, signaling to the audience that, okay, they're supposed to be speaking German but for broad appeal's sake they're all just going to speak in English. It perhaps sounds a little iffy but it works surprisingly well for the movie.
What was probably the biggest challenge for Valkyrie to overcome was to create tension and interest while depicting events where we already know the outcome. Obviously the attempt on Hitler's life failed but the film somehow manages to make you second guess that truth. In the scenes where the film works well, those involving the meticulous planning of the assassination, we get sucked into the fact that they might just pull it off, that actually they might succeed in killing Hitler. It may have something to do with us being 100% behind what it is they're trying to accomplish that makes us invest in it but nonetheless it was an extremely difficult task that the film accomplishes well.
Article comments
1 - TheRewdDewd
It's a mystery to me how these projects come into being. Had Cruise even heard of Claus von Stauffenberg before he was handed a script? Did he have an appreciation of the social context that existed in Germany during the war? This story - in particular Stauffenberg's - was in very real danger when Cruise got his hands on it.
I just heard about the movie today(I must admit to purposefully ignoring the news the past few years) and I was horrified. Though I do not agree with the man's politics, you cannot help but admire his strength of character and his bravery. Cruise is miscast. Due to its complexity this story could only be done by one man today, and that man is Viggo Mortensen. Tommy - you ain't even close, baby. How about a flick about Ron L. Hubbard next time? Now that would be a casting home run.