Dresden (2006)

Fresh and Exciting

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

'Dresden's setting is great, very authentic, and historically correct: my true congratulations for the fine results of director Richter's painstaking research.Unfortunately this foundation carries a less happy choice of leading actor & actress. John Light surely acts a competent RAF bomber-pilot, but does not convince as a love match for a girl like Felicitas Woll. Their characters just do not match.Apart form that, one cannot escape wondering if Felicitas Woll is the right girl for a film like this. In my opinion her talents are much better suited for light comedy or slapstick.

Even though this German television film is high melodrama, its quality and insight overcome any clichés that might appear in the plot. World War II in Europe is on the wane. Germany is basically defeated but refused to give up. On a mission into Germany an English bomber pilot and his crew are shot down. Those who do not initially die in the crash are killed by villagers all save the pilot who manages to escape. Wounded, he seeks shelter in a hospital and is discovered by a nurse. She hides him and gives him medical help. She soon discovers that he understands her, because his mother was German.The pilot is dumped into a melodramatic mess in which the father of his savior nurse - the head of the hospital - is withholding pain killer from the wounded German soldiers and citizens in order to sell them on the black market and buy his family a way out of Germany before the inevitable defeat. Not only that, the nurse's intended is a self-serving coward. It seems that the only one around who lives up to the German ideals is the wounded British pilot. Needless-to-say, a love affair blossoms between the nurse and the pilot.But surrounding all of this melodrama is the story of Dresden written and produced by Germans whose view of the situation and the lives of the everyday citizens of a city that will soon become an incredible, flaming oven of death is insightful and horrifyingly realistic.This film was excellently produced with a quest for accuracy - an accuracy that is hard to view but one that is necessary for anyone who contemplates the inhumanity of war. It is clear that the bombing of Dresden was more of a punishment of Germany rather than an attack needed to end an already devastating war.There is much to learn in the special features of the DVD that add to the rewards of the film. If you - like myself - knew of the firebombing of Dresden, have read a little, but didn't know much more, I think you will find this a worthwhile viewing. Plus, there's a nice love story with agreeable actors.

This film took up three hours, including commercials, on the History International Channel last night. But it felt like three weeks. It wasn't the cheap, stagy and unintentionally funny depictions of the bombing of Dresden. It wasn't that the film is stripped of almost all context surrounding World War II. It wasn't even that the bombing itself was often made to appear as nothing more than a major inconvenience for a goofy love story. No, it was the wooden featureless characterizations that sucked the life out of the story. Oh, and the fact that if it is possible for a movie to be obsequious, then Dresden is that movie. Perhaps a better title would have been DRESDEN--AS URIAH HEEP WOULD HAVE EXPERIENCED IT.It is especially the latter point that so irritates. Was the bombing of Dresden a war crime? The makers of this movie believe so. But in the typically emasculated way that Germans have come to approach World War II, they can't bring themselves to say so without braying about "peace" and "no more wars--anywhere" like they're Mother Teresa. And, also typical of German obsequiousness towards the British in particular, there is an unwieldy effort to grovel before "Britishness", while loading all the "guilt" for Dresden on to one person, Arthur Harris.Did I say one person? Well, not quite. At the beginning of the movie, there is an exclamation from the leading character, Anna, with whom we are all supposed to sympathize. "Damned Americans!", she screams, while watching as far off bombs fall. And a few minutes later, a radio voice intones warnings about the "American Terror Bombing" being inflicted upon Germans.Note the word, "terror". Got that? It's really the Americans behind the inhumane targeting of German civilians. No matter that the American strategy for almost all the war in Europe was the "precision" bombing of industrial and war manufacturing sites. No matter that it was the British who enthusiastically adopted "area" bombing of civilian targets in Germany--before the Germans had themselves even targeted English ones. No matter that the Americans bombed during the day, suffering more casualties in the process than the British, in order to hit precision targets, while the British bombed civilians under the cover of night. No matter that the Americans, essentially, were brought into the RAF's true terror bombing campaign kicking and screaming against it. No matter that most American officials, from FDR to Gen. Dolittle, opposed targeting civilians, while Churchill and his generals couldn't wait to do so.No, in DRESDEN, both the Germans and British, except for "Bomber" Harris, are innocent of a doctrine, it is intimated, created by the evil Americans. And only the might and power of a love story between a German nurse and a downed British bomber pilot can adequately explain the "truth" of the atrocity. Right.Oh, by the way, for the younger and likely less well read readers of IMDb, the first and still so far only major literary effort to give a thoughtful voice to Dresden's bombing was the pacifist novel penned by Kurt Vonnegut--an American POW in Dresden at the time of the bombing. I guess Germany's ZDF couldn't find a pretty nurse for Billy Pilgrim.

I have no idea how historically accurate this movie is, but it gives a good idea of what the bombing of Dresden was like. Yes, there's all sorts of drama and even romance woven into the plot. To me that's expected, otherwise it would be a documentary and maybe even boring. It's really well done for a TV film. The acting is good. The storyline is believable. The effects are very realistic. I don't think this movie was made so that Germans can feel sorry for their suffering under Hitler. Instead, I think it's an acknowledgement of the suffering and it gives the current and future generations a view of the horror of the past. I wish there were stuff of this caliber made for American TV. I hope this gets released with English subtitles so that English speaking audiences get to see it.