What do you realize about the true value of war movies by watching the drama version made after the movie ``The Boat'' was released?

Why did the original author criticize the movie so harshly?

The movie ``The Boat'' is based on the novel `` U-Boat '' published in 1973. The author, Buchheim, served on board U96 during the war as part of the German Navy's press corps. Based on that experience, he wrote a 600-page novel in two volumes. Buchheim reviewed the movie ``The Boat'' as follows.

"It's like a cheap, shallow American action movie."

The harsh and irritated evaluation may be more understandable if we look back at the production process of ``The Boat.''

``The Boat'' cost 32 million German marks (approximately 4 billion yen in Japanese yen), an unprecedented amount for the time, and a huge amount of scenes were shot over a two-year production period. . The resulting material was compiled into 149 minutes and released as a film in 1981. This is the theatrical version that Buchheim criticized harshly.

However, in the shadow of the theatrical version, a huge amount of footage remained unreleased, and it was there that the essence of ``The Boat'' was hidden.

It saw the light of day in 1984, three years after its theatrical release. ``The Boat'' was aired on BBC2 in the UK as a drama series with six episodes totaling approximately 300 minutes. *This drama version is currently available on DVD.

Of the six episodes, the first three episodes of the drama version of ``The Boat'' are particularly noteworthy. The theatrical version focuses on the elements from episodes 4 to 6, and the elements from episodes 1 to 3 are largely removed. Let's take a look below to see what elements were left out in the theatrical version.

In the first episode, the night before the U-boat sortie, the orgy at the officers' club is endlessly depicted. Soldiers who are overwhelmed with anxiety and pressure before going on a sortie drink heavily and play with women. Vulgar words are thrown around, and a veteran warrior is covered in vomit. In the movie version, this sequence is about 5 minutes long, but in the drama version, it takes over 30 minutes.

"The Boat" (c)Photofest / Getty Images

The second episode depicts a U-boat sortieing in the North Atlantic in search of a cargo convoy. However, the enemy is not easy to find. In the middle of the ocean, monotonous days continue, isolated from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the poor environment on board the ship continues to deteriorate. There is no sunlight, and a foul smell fills the ship, corroding the spirits of the soldiers. Furthermore, the inability to fire torpedoes was linked to sexual dissatisfaction, and soldiers began to talk obscene stories that they were afraid to write about.

Just as I thought about that, a storm hit that lasted for two weeks, shaking my body and mind. The above depiction continues for 100 minutes throughout the second and third episodes. These elements, which make the drama extremely suffocating and painful to watch, were hardly used in the 1981 theatrical version.

However, the boredom and frustration of this battlefield may have been the original author Buchheim's main theme.

A drama version that rejects the romance of war and emphasizes the nature of torture.