Really sucks, huh?

Check out these previous posts:
http://www.moviemusic.com/mb/Forum1/HTML/002324.html

Also, if you want a mediocre recording in mp3 from the theater, I can send you one.

FOR EXAMPLE:

Bill Paxton setting the bar for command ability at your willingness to send your crewmembers to their deaths... it basically spelled out the end of the film.

The scene with the British lifeboat was pretty pointless. It only served to remind you that the Nazis were bad guys. Thanks, I think we noticed (notice the CONFLICTED Nazi at the gun! Cute!).

The idea that one of the crewmembers speaks German and was worried about his peer's reaction to this fact is a great idea, but it is dropped as soon as he speaks German. It makes you wonder what the point was of bringing this up.

The crew getting all bent out of shape about having to travel through German waters was a bit daft considering that they were in a German U-boat (read: camoflage) with the Lektor device, so it's not like they couldn't figure out what was going on around them.

When the German battleship is pulling over the U-571, the mission political officer guy (the one that spoke German) could have put on the Captain's hat and uniform and made some kind of play at getting out of this situation. Why was this never attempted? Why, because Matthew McConaughy is the captain!

Several times the film forces you to acknowledge the submarine movie cliches to advance the plot, but at others it plays on them, hoping you'll forget the fact that you've ever seen another sub flick.

Richard Marvin's score seemed, at times (such as the sinking of the American sub) to be inappropriate. Nevertheless, it was nice to hear a straightfoward orchestral score for a sub film (although I like Poledouris' technothriller "The Hunt for Red October," Zimmer's "Crimson Tide" wears thin very quickly), and I am willing to blame most of my problems with the score on the filmmaker, who seems to have a problem communicating with composers (Poledouris wrote TWO scores for "Breakdown").

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For those of you who are wondering what the score sounds like, go put on "The Parachutes" from Air Force One. That's the blueprint of U-571's theme. If you want the music for the post-sinking of the American sub, go put on "The Hijacking" from the same score.

quote:

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Originally posted by Swashbuckler:
The idea that one of the crewmembers speaks German and was worried about his peer's reaction to this fact is a great idea, but it is dropped as soon as he speaks German. It makes you wonder what the point was of bringing this up.

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That was actually quite unique. I liked the way they did that. They made you think a conflict was gonna arise between him and the other crewmembers, but they avoided it and everything turned out okay for the kid.

One of the main dramatist's rule is don't ever tell the audience anything they don't need to know. It annoyed me and the people I went to see the movie with to get all these red herrings suggesting a more interesting movie might have unfolded had these ideas been followed through.

The aforementioned mission political officer that spoke German was another example of an interesting character whose potential was wasted.

NP - "Dragonslayer" by Alex North