'U-571': Getting a Bang Out of War By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 21, 2000

Matthew McConaughey (right) stars in "U-571." (Universal)

It's the World War II sub movie as modern thrill-o-rama and effect-a-ganza, so full of explosions and emergencies that you never have a moment to consider what's at stake or who's at stake. It pulps you, but it doesn't enlighten you.

Is it fun? Hell, yes. Do you emerge soaked in your own sweat with your knees atremble? Totally. Are you glad you were born in a nice war-free world for your kind of people and only their kind of people have to get killed in the line of duty? Completely. Have you learned something, as you did from "Saving Private Ryan," that makes you better appreciate the liberties you enjoy? Well, not really.

The movie seems to spring untouched from the loins of the gung-ho mid-World War II agitprop film that so delighted baby boomers lying safely on the floors of their split-levels' TV rooms in the '50s, like "Destination Tokyo" (Grant and Garfield) or "Crash Dive" (Ty Power). But its true antecedent may go back even further to the boys' adventure novels of the same war, in which a callow young American teenager named Dave Dawson, assisted by a British best pal named Freddie Farmer (alliteration was big back then), blew up an endless profusion of Nazis without uttering anything so intense as "Gee whillikers." In that adventurous spirit "U-571" clings to its bloodless (but not bodyless) PG-13 rating.

The tale turns on the Enigma, the infernal German super-typewriter by which the High Command communicated with its subs at sea. They have it, we need it, and we figure out a way to get it. In the North Atlantic das Boot U-571 floats damaged after an engagement. American naval intelligence intercepts the sub's radio message (how, lacking an Enigma, is a question that goes unanswered) and hastily sends an ancient American sub, the S-33, to approach under the Nazi flag (a tactic, one must point out, that would have been way too sneaky for a real WWII movie!). The Americans are to shoot their way aboard the injured boat, remove its code engine, scuttle it and return to port. The wrinkle: When the boarding team has taken over U-571, S-33 is torpedoed by another German sub and the movie finds its proper subject: skeleton crew of Americans aboard an enemy sub whose machinery they only partially understand and who must fight for survival because the outcome of the war depends on them.

The director, Jonathan Mostow, has done a spectacular job of re-creating the realities of submarine warfare, World War II-style. It's no "Das Boot" thematically--too callow, too narcissistic, too silly and credulous--but at the palpable experiential level, the movie convinces wholly. It sees subs as one instinctively presumes they were: valve-crammed sewer pipes fragile as eggshells and apt to spring leaks or erupt into flames at any second. Water, water everywhere, most of it pouring in through unsealed valves and hatches. The movie's signal accomplishment is to convince us of the wetness of water and its capacity for amplifying sound like a Bose woofer. It hurts your ears and makes your feet cold.

Beneath the rush of the plot, the very few human issues are trite: mainly, will wet-behind-the-ears Lt. Tyler (the ever-earnest Matthew McConaughey) learn to be tough enough to command under the guidance of stern old Chief Petty Officer Klough (Harvey Keitel)? This dilemma was more dynamically handled in 1942's "The Immortal Sergeant," a much better movie, where stern old Thomas Mitchell assisted wet-behind-the-ears Henry Fonda on a long-range desert patrol. Mitchell and Fonda were great actors who could create a subtext of apprenticeship amid the backlot explosions; McConaughey is simply too one-dimensional to register much, even when he's standing in the conning tower of a 600-ton replica unterseeboot plowing through the waves.

As story, the movie resolves itself into two long sea duels. The first is between the American-commanded U-571 and that newly arrived German resupply sub, a three-dimensional torpedo shootout at 20 fathoms. Its intensity is jacked up by a brilliant stroke: The Americans in U-571 don't quite understand the nuances of their new boat. It's as if they're fighting in a dream, where nothing quite makes sense, where they can only guess at the meanings of the dials and the valves, while their opponents are fighting in reality. Additionally, the technical sophistication to replicate undersea explosions has improved exponentially: When a sub catches a torpedo in the conning tower, it blossoms with a really cool image suggesting wet flame.

The second half of the picture pitches U-571 against a German destroyer that has run it down. It recalls the excellent 1957 war drama "The Enemy Below," where German sub captain Curt Juergens and USN skip Bob Mitchum tried not merely to blow each other up but to outthink the other first. "U-571" isn't as good as "The Enemy Below," of course, and the second half isn't as good as the first.

One can't quite say "U-571" is all wet, but it's definitely a movie that sees war as a kind of sporting event where Our Guys always win. It hasn't a whisper of tragedy in its heart, though by my count it contains at least 500 tragedies (the crews, U.S. and German, of the four vessels that are deep-sixed, leaving at day's end only a handful of survivors). It barely pauses to notice; it's too busy having a good time.