Elser, un héros ordinaire

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.

Some assassins (and would-be assasins) are highly politcally motivated. Others are just crazy. Oliver Hirschbiegel's film about Georg Elser, who single-handedly attempted to Kill Adolf Hitler in 1939, suggests he was neither; or at least, that his political antipathy to the Fuehrer was driven by a more generalised disgust at the sheer ugliness and banal brutality of life under the Nazis. Hisrschbiegl previously made the brilliant 'Downfall' about Hitler's final days; this film is somewhat less awesome, in part because it focuses on Elser's arrest and interrogation, and tells the story of his earlier life in flashback, removing some of its sense of immediacy. It's still an interesting story, not about a hero in the classical sense, but about a good man, and a brave one.

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.

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.

Great acting for a story worth knowing. Elser is a true hero that understood early the extreme danger the Nazi was for Germany itself. Effectively, the germans had lost their minds to think they would not have eventually to pay for their murderous rampages. However, historically, if his murder had succeeded, germany could have done better during the war and maybe even won it, since a few bad decisions were later attributed to Hitler himself, like the attack on Russia instead of England.