Pretty good. The thing is, there are tons of World War II films and tons of Holocaust films, but rare is the film that focuses primarily on Hitler himself. He is not an easy man to portray, so avoidance is the rule of thumb. Well, Der Untergang (or Downfall) is specifically about Hitler's last days in the bunker and his interactions with his top men and closest "family," so you couldn't exactly go Jon Voight-in-Pearl Harbor and expect to come away with a winning flick.
Bruno Ganz stars as Der Fuhrer and, insofar as I can judge this sort of thing, he gave a damn good performance. Considering Downfall occurs when Hitler's entire life is falling down around him--his Thousand Year Reich has become merely a fantasy, his top staff is betraying him for their own self-interest, and his delusional paranoia leads him to conclude that it is the Jews who are opening round-the-clock artillery fire on his lair--Ganz's task couldn't have been easy. He obviously had to get down "angry Hitler," because there was certainly a motherload to be angry about, but he couldn't fully barrel into a crazed buffoon or a caricature without risking making the film look like a modern Thomas Nast creation. A deft balance was required; when all is said and done (and based on my personal experience spending ample one-on-one time with Adolf Hitler), I really enjoyed the results.
It certainly seemed to be a very strange film. It is principally about Hitler's last bunker days of course, but it also offers substantial screentime to a few select characters (Hitler's secretary being essentially the film's protagonist, but, in addition, a young boy, a skeptical Nazi doctor, Speer, Goebbels, Eva Braun, and a slew of top Nazi military men) and features short bursts of heavy military battling (read: Nazis getting the living fuck mortared out of them). Downfall basically rotates between these many subplots, always preserving a permeating degree of apocalyptic pessimism, but providing a nice variety of lenses through which to view the time leading up to V-E Day. Of course, it's Nazis, so there are no scenes like the train-to-Auschwitz sequence in Schindler's List, and overall, empathy and relatability is on the low side for a WWII flick. (There are virtually identical scenes in this and Saving Private Ryan, where the unwitting soldier takes a bullet through his helmet, but somehow, for some inexplicable reason, it's hard to care much when that soldier is fighting for Germany...)
But overall--yes, well done. Hitler had good taste in hot secretaries. Although, seriously--no wall decoration of any kind in the bunker? No paintings? No posters? Come on, Adolf...
