Elser, un héros ordinaire

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.