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Valkyrie (2008)

Director: Bryan Singer

Time Out rating

Average user rating

45 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

DVD is ruining historical education in this country: with hundreds of movies now available, there’s no reason for the families of middle England to gather around the TV on a wet bank holiday afternoon to watch ‘The Colditz Story’ for the umpteenth time. But help is at hand: in ‘Valkyrie’, Tom Cruise doesn’t just set out to beat the Boche, but to save the great British Sunday.
It’s surprising that Hollywood never got around to making an all-star epic about the plot of July 1944, in which a group of disgruntled generals, led by the aristocratic von Stauffenberg (Cruise), attempted to off the Führer and rescue Germany’s reputation. The failure of the assassination plan, and the attempted coup that followed, marked the end of organised Germanic resistance to Hitler’s regime.

Director Bryan Singer takes a staunchly old-school approach, assembling a cast of reliable British thesps and dividing the action between swastika-adorned wood-panelled offices and rainswept, shadowy Berlin streets. The period is exactingly recreated, with the camera lingering lovingly over leather jackboots, snarling dogs and those fetishistic, immaculately starched uniforms.
‘Valkyrie’ has serious flaws: the script, by Nathan Alexander and Singer’s longtime compadre Christopher McQuarrie, takes an age to get going and steers clear of any moral ambiguity. Too many of the prestigious cast – notably Kenneth Branagh and token female Carice van Houten – are underused, and the accents are simply ludicrous, with Cruise’s mid-American drawl sitting awkwardly alongside Branagh’s cultured RP and the Führer’s Teutonic whine. But as old-fashioned historical escapism goes, this is solid, compelling stuff.

Author: Tom Huddleston 2009-01-20 11:47:23

Time Out London Issue 2005, 22-28 Jan. 2009

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User reviews of this film

Nathan Burrell said...

Posted on Jan 25 2009 21:21 If you want pure gripping and moving piece of history than this film had it all.Ok Tom Cruise role was not oscar material but I thought he played the role just right.

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wolf72 said...

Posted on Jan 25 2009 20:52 Forgot all the arty oiks on here who over analyse every single aspect of a film. This was a cracking film, if you just want to be entertained by a gripping thriller rather than receive a lecture on second world war politics then it will be right up your street.
I was a little bit hesitant taking the other half to see it but she loved it, It might not sweep the boards at any film awards but its a cracking film in my opinion! It is not a history lesson it is entertanment, just remember that and i'm sure you'll love it too!

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morri said...

Posted on Jan 25 2009 09:19 A little disappointed with film,a little bit boring throughout the film,beginning of the film was captivating then nothing really happens after that,just lots of plotting and scheming overall an ok film,tom cruise acting was good and a few of the other well known actors there, maybe it was the script itself that let the film down,ending was sad but I guess they died with dignity.Rating 6/10

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usman khawaja said...

Posted on Jan 25 2009 02:55 rather a wasted vision of a worthy man vindicating a violent regime -this is a wasted oppurtunity as it could have been so much more but the importune dialogues which reek of propaganda and the expressionless facies of tom cruise never let it rise above mediocricy ,which is such a pity as stauffenberg is such a spectacular figure in todays immoral and violent era where innocents are slaughtered in the name of collateral damage and you need to propagate figures of his mettle to make people aware of simple morality forgotten in a greedy era .
singer is also rather juvenile as he stages the confused cospiracy as if it was a scouts tale -i was reminded of the excellent day of jackal while watching it .
but alas it came nowhere even near its great potential and there was hardly any spectacle other then the shiny leather boots worn by the german army .
a few scenes are well executed but as a whole it is limp and disappointing mainly because cruise neither has the character nor the talent to play a man of substance .
but i liked it better then the movies i saw in the last few weeks which were neither entertaining nor real -at least this tries to inspire even while it fails though that is rather sad as it could have been a classic in better hands with a different cast .
but it was tolerable in toto though tom cruise needs to call it a day .

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owen lloyd said...

Posted on Jan 23 2009 22:52 i loved it especially when tom cruise was naughty and stripped!

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owen said...

Posted on Jan 23 2009 22:48 just patheteic

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HB said...

Posted on Jan 23 2009 13:48 Hollywood never got around to making a film about the Valkyrie plot primarily because the whole of German society always had to be viewed as a faceless stereotypical mob of Nazi bootlickers totally insensitive to the moral depravity surrounding them. When a society like Germany in the 1930's was so technologically advanced and yet so morally challenged in a primitive way and economically challenged by high inflation and unemployment, except for rampant flagrant hate crimes against Jews encouraged by the Nazis, the state of that society parallels certain similarities to our current culture. The deterioration of values in the educated, especially at the highest levels of government is very unsettling. History books and Hollywood find it much easier to ignore any evidence of the existence of a German resistance against Hiter. Valkyrie presents what most people aren't really interested in looking at unless their grandparents lived in Germany or England during that time or they are able to imagine what it might be like living in a society that is going downhill fast with check to the downhill slide visible and that is the background atmosphere that was very effectively evoked in the film.

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L Bone said...

Posted on Jan 23 2009 05:06 There is a paperback book called Secret Germany that documents the Valkyrie plot and history behind Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933. It details the 1st and 2nd Reichs and how Hitler set up the SS and Gestapo to against the German Army and why it was so difficult to get rid of Hitler from inside the upper levels of the German Army. Much of the material is from German Army officers who survived.

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alexi said...

Posted on Jan 22 2009 17:51 A truly awful film, Brian Singer has rendered boring and unbelievable a story that should be fascinating, Cruise brings no depth to the role and most of the supporting cast, with the excpetion of Tom Wilkinson, are not very good either.

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Nick said...

Posted on Jan 04 2009 16:02 I thought this was an excellent movie. No doubt these people had made compromises in their lives but in the end they did what they believed had to be done.........to the point of paying with their lives.

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L. Bone said...

Posted on Dec 30 2008 18:43 Stauffenberg and the others in on the plot could be criticized for acting too late but they could also be criticized for not doing anything at all had they taken that course. I'm not sure, but it seems to me more of the Nazis escaped death when they were taken prisoner, then went to prison or or were executed for war crimes. Doing anything at all even late in the Reich was certainly more life-threatening than being taken prisoner. Maybe someone has the actual numbers. Of course it would have been better if someone had stopped Hitler at the time of the burning of the Reichstag and a man was murdered and blamed for having set the fire that suspiciously burned the Reichstag to the ground.

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Bruce Vallance said...

Posted on Dec 22 2008 19:58 I'm well aware that it's very stylish today to hang on every word uttered by so-called celebrities as if they were the final authority on all things. I however have to point out that besides being famous for acting; that is speaking lines of dialogue written by other men, they are fallible. A case in point is the latest movie by Mr Tom Cruise; "Valkyrie". No matter how much lipstick Hollywood would like to put on the pig, the men portrayed here are not to be admired. To portray Claus Von Stauffenberg and his ilk as some kind of hero couldn't be further from the truth. These men weren't common or garden variety men off the street who were down and out, conscripted into the army and so were forced or cajoled into carrying out NAZI policy. They were the German nobility, the so-called elite of the country. The cream of society. These men and their like could have stopped Hitler and his henchmen at any time from 1925 on. They had all read "Mein Kampf". They were well aware of his monstrous plans. They chose instead to take their place at the table and partake of the feast. They joined the NAZI party in order to reep the benefits of membership. They knew of the "Camps" They were aware that the hospitals, asylums and institutions were being emptied and the inmates shipped off to internment camps. The blind, the lame, the deaf and the mentally ill were considered "Unter Mensch" along with the Jews, Gypsies and anyone else the regime didn't like. These people were not considered to have the right to live in the Third Reich. The new German utopia. Instead they were raped, tortured, murdered and used in the most horrendous medical experiments by animals like Mengele all with the tacit approval of these noble elite. They filled their mansions with the looted artwork and antiques belonging to their victims and all of europe. As long as they were on the winning side they could claim that they were "Just Following Orders!" When it became obvious that Germany was in danger of losing the war, like rats they started to desert the sinking ship.They thought that their plot would cut them some slack with the allies and get them a better deal after the war. Thoughts of their victims, those millions were the last thing on their minds. Their own skins were their uppermost concern. They had backed the wrong horse in this race and now were in a panic. These men weren't heros; at best they were opportunists and cowards, and now their chickens had come home to roost. Their sudden attack of conscience came a little late for their millions of innocent victims who had died in the most horrendous manner. To make a movie which lionizes them and makes them out to be heroic does a grave disservice to the tortured souls of their victims who cry out for justice. Once again we're ignoring their cries and pardoning the unpardonable. I agree with the universal cry of Never Again. It may be time we started teaching our children the truth about what happened instead of relying solely on some script writer in Hollywood to do it for us.
Bruce Vallance

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Dave said...

Posted on Dec 15 2008 06:11 Von Stauffenberg is regarded in rare high esteem in Germany. I lived in Germany for 5 years with the Air Force, and virtually every German calls him a national hero. At Expo 2000, in Hanover, his bust was included along with Beethoven, Goethe, and others as indicative of the heights Germany has reached along curtural and ethical lines.

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antony said...

Posted on Dec 12 2008 12:59 excellent performance from Cruise, yep! so the movie too. I was impressed, we know the end of the story but the developpement is particular, must-see.

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Brad Ford said...

Posted on Dec 08 2008 09:41 So now that Tom Cruise has another movie should we be expecting a new album from Michael Jackson ?

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