Downfall

I went to see the movie Downfall last night.

It's about the last 10 days of the life of Hitler.

Some good friends, who know how I feel about War,

said that it was good, and that the acting was excellent.

So, I took a friend that I've known for about six days to see it with me.

Here is what Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe says:

''Downfall," the recent best foreign film Oscar nominee from Germany, decides to tell its story from the perspective of Hitler and his followers. The whole film -- and a bizarre film it is --takes place during the humiliating twilight of the Third Reich and features characters with only minor or last-minute deviations from the Hitler agenda.

It's an arresting and skillfully made movie, directed with force by Oliver Hirschbiegel and adapted by Bernd Eichinger from a pair of books chronicling the events that brought the curtain down on the Nazis in April 1945, including one by Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge.

Most of the story unfolds in an elaborate maze of bunkers in the bowels of the German Chancellery, where a harried and spent Hitler (Bruno Ganz) and members of his party and house staff have taken refuge from the Russian army that has surrounded Berlin and rapidly reduced it to ruins.

For 2½ hours, the sound of exploding bombs and the sensation of quaking ground never quite dissipate. These are the final hours before Hitler took his life. We are there, and the experience is fittingly awful.

Well, after about 45 minutes of bombs and ghost like old people

hiding in hospitals with piled up bodies in dusty corridors,

I leaned over to my friend and said,

Do you mind if we leave?

The Old Biker Priest just didn't need to see this much suffering.

What I saw was children defending the disease of Nationalism

to the dreary end.

What I saw was courageous warriors being mislead by a psychopath.

What I saw was a sophisticated, refined civilization crashing in on itself.

The children reminded me of the ones I saw this week with

tape on their mouths.

They were defending a lie and an abomination.

The Warriors reminded me of the ones who came home from Vietnam

and soon enough, Iraq.

The civilization reminds me of certain geographic state

that has held itself out to be the light of the nations,

and is now a world empire,

that uses Freedom and Justice as a pretense

to secure strategic resources.

I'm sure it's a good movie.

But I'm watching it already.



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