So the story is entirely fictional. Well, not entirely, I suppose. There really was an Operation Valkyrie - a failed attempt by the military to assassinate Hitler in the weeks after D-Day. Beyond that, this is pretty much fictional. The plot has a number of high-ranking Nazi officials along with a German Catholic Bishop planning to make off with a huge amount of gold bullion, escape in a submarine to Argentina and, with this war lost, try to establish the Fourth Reich. Yes, there were a number of high ranking Nazis who escaped to Argentina as the war came to an end. Yes, the Catholic Church had some involvement in those escapes. But there's no evidence that I know of that any huge amount of German gold went with them or that there was any intention or desire to start a "Fourth Reich." Most of them just wanted to escape prosecution for war crimes. So, there's a grain of truth to this story (as there generally is with all legends) but it is a fictional story - and to its credit, it makes no claim otherwise. It opens with captions offering a description of the anti-Hitler German underground - although it overstates the significance of the movement: the vast majority of Nazis (and even every day Germans) remained loyal to Hitler, or at least unwilling to do anything against him - and it closes with captions describing the exodus of some Nazis to South America, and then offering some thoughts about the co-operation between the Americans and the Soviets during the war.
Now, there's the point of the story, I think. Using the aftermath of the failed Operation Valkyrie as the context, the movie really offers a portrayal of a group of American (and one British) members of a special ops team parachuted into East Prussia to extract an anti-Nazi German officer who has information valuable to the Allies who are forced to co-operate with a Soviet special ops team working in the same area. The American team is led by Sean Patrick Flanery as Capt. Blackburn and the Soviet team by Pasha D. Lychnikoff as Maj. Kulkov (who I recognized from his turn as an astronaut on a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory.) Personally, I thought Lychnikoff offered the stronger performance of the two. Distrustful of each other at first, the two teams have to begin to work together against their common enemy (and, as they were deep behind enemy lines, their common threat.) A lot of that is pretty typical war movie stuff. There are a lot of firefights, and most of them are entirely unbelievable as this small number of Allied soldiers repeatedly takes down innumerable German soldiers. But it's a war movie. You expect that.
The most intriguing character in the movie was probably Elke - the very pretty secretary of one of the German officers seeking escape to Argentina - who was actually a part of the Kreisau Circle, which was in fact one of the major anti-Hitler conspiracies. She was played by the very pretty Julie Engelbrecht, an actress largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic, most of whose work has been done in Germany. She is, indeed, very pretty - and she does a good job in the role, and I thought Elke was an important character who in a way represented to me the future of Germany, torn between East and West. Actually, the whole movie seems to be a sort of setting up of the Cold War more than counting down the last days of World War II.
No one is going to watch this and think it's one of the great World War II movies. The whole story is just a bit too outlandish to be taken seriously. But it has its moments of excitement. (6/10)
