Elser

I liked how this movie was told. It's a great experience seeing this retrospective. The actor who played Georg Elser delivered a very respectable job. The message he tried to transmit to the Nazis wasn't understood unfortunately. He was a very clever and courageous man. We should never forget him even if his plan failed. Just imagine what happened to all the humanity if Adolf Hitler lost his life in the bomb attack. The locations were well developed and I felt really to be in the scene. Watch it, you won't regret. 7/10.

Interesting movie about a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1939. The lead character Elser, well played by Christian Friedel, is a young carpenter who see's trouble coming in the form of Hitler and decides to do something about it. We start with the assassination, which fails by 13 minutes, hence the title, because Hitler leaves early. The rest of the story is told using flashbacks while Elser is being interrogated. Some of the interrogation methods used are quite brutal and show what it must have been like if you crossed the Nazi party back in the thirties and forties.

This true story is well told and makes interesting viewing.

Unlike so many subsidised movies about the Nazi era, this one isn't superficial and moralistic. Instead it tries to, and succeeds in, painting an authentic portrait of the prewar Nazi era in a village in rural Germany. Most of all, the movie is captivating. We get under the skin of this idiosyncratic carpenter who missed changing world history, and possibly saving tens of millions of lives, by a margin of just 13 minutes.

The movie stands of as one of the few who manage to depict what it could have been like to live under the Nazi dictatorship. What would you do if one of your friends was sent off to do forced labour, or another one was pilloried for her supposedly immoral behaviour. As the benefactors of a free society, we would like to think that we would stand up against such injustice. This movie conveys how difficult, how impossible it was to be decent under the Nazi yoke. It goes much to Georg Elser's credit that he tried to do the impossible nevertheless.

Movie about assassination-attempts has a natural point to use as its climax: the attempt itself. It would not be easy to keep the ending surprising if the target is Adolf Hitler, and the year 1939. This movie thankfully does not attempt to build to the grand assassination attempt, but opens with it, and spends the rest of the runtime pondering: Who is this Elser guy? What did he do? How did he do it? Why did he do it? It does this by using the interrogations as a sort of frame, and then delving into episodes from Elser's life. It does not attempt to tell his entire life story, but rather pick scenes helpfully to understand the state of mind he was in during that pivotal moment in 1939.

This is an interesting story that is very much worth telling. Elser seems to be an extraordinary character, and it's one of those moments in history where everything could have been completely different. The movie has taken some shortcuts though, as is to be expected. Elser is shown as both a clever, talented man (as he was), but at also with some faults. He is shown as almost apolitical, which makes for an interesting character, but the movie would have been better if they had explored what is known about Elser's actual relationship with Nazism.

Over all it is a movie worth seeing, even though it is easy to be bored by all of the movie about the brave men who fought Nazism, as they often spend very little time on how Nazis also were people. Good vs evil is a misrepresentation. That said, this movie handles much better than many other movies with similar subjects.

Wow, well those were definitely the unluckiest 13 minutes of all time. 55 million deaths could have been averted.

A really well made and acted movie about a story that I didn't know but certainly is worth knowing.

Well paced and edited. Usually historical jump cuts don't work but they really worked well here.

I thoroughly recommend this movie showing that it's in all of us to change destiny if we truly follow our convictions.