If that wasn’t enough for the junior Hoffmann to undertake, he’s immediately undercut by his First Watch Officer, or second in command, Karl Tennstedt (August Wittgenstein, The Crown), who has far more experience and is more aggressively combat-oriented than the calmer, rule-following Hoffmann.Īfter a little table setting, Das Boot becomes immediately thrilling and addictive, with co-creators and writers Tony Saint and Johannes W. The German navy is ramping up production of U-boats as a tactical advantage - in later episodes there’s information that they are the most feared weapon by Winston Churchill - but at the same time Germany is losing a striking number of its fleet, whether to Allied depth charges or mechanical failure.ĭas Boot centers on newly minted captain Klaus Hoffmann (Rick Okon), whose father was a legendary German U-boat captain who wrote the most authoritative book on what it’s like to live underwater and win at sea. The series begins in the Germany-occupied port town of La Rochelle, France, in 1942 (roughly nine months after the film’s ending). What makes Das Boot particularly riveting, of course, is that so much of it takes place within the confines of a German U-boat (the vessel language before “submarine” was in use), with dangerous missions and pretty terrible conditions for the men in many cases, the U-boats themselves were untested (a feature in the original film, as well). Lizzy Caplan ( Castle Rock, Masters of Sex) and Vincent Kartheiser ( Mad Men) are Americans in the cast, but this is primarily a German effort with some French actors (and there are subtitles abounding, but mostly the actors are speaking English). It’s not critical to have seen the original movie (though fans of German cinema will undoubtedly tell you to go do it anyway), since this eight-part series picks up where that one ended, thus becoming more of a sequel while still relying on the two source books from author Lothar-Gunther Buchheim ( Das Boot, Die Festung).
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