Rick's Flicks: Sink the Bismarck!

Steyn On-Line ^ | May 27, 2023 | Rick McGinnis

[Twotone]

It's fun and easy to make fun of Hollywood's creative bankruptcy these days, and its reliance on remakes and reboots and retellings of stories it's told many times before. There are, however, some stories worth remaking; Roland Emmerich's recent Midway (2019) was as strident and bombastic as anything made by Michael Bay, but at least it put the 1976 film of the same name, a star-studded but tedious Sensurround epic, deep in the shadows where it belongs.

Like sci-fi, war films are the major beneficiaries of the digital effects revolution. Some taste and restraint are needed, of course, though they're often in short supply; Russia in particular has recently produced dozens of war films (White Tiger, T-34, Tankers, Stalingrad, The Pilot), usually with scripts of a much lower priority to the filmmakers than increasingly outlandish and improbable visual effects – tank shells in Russian pictures travel in slow motion, the camera trailing and spinning around them as they create outsized damage with impossible accuracy.

But when I see the quality and technical sophistication of films like Dunkirk (2017) and 1917 (2019), I can't help but hope that someday someone will take another shot at the story of the Bismarck, the leviathan German battleship that was the most feared ship on the ocean during the early days of World War 2, albeit only for the eight days of her first and only voyage. There is, of course, a perfectly serviceable film about the Bismarck available on streaming services and disc, but to modern eyes it looks like a relic from the days of model boats filmed in swimming pools.

Sink the Bismarck! was released in 1960, based on C.S. Forester's Hunting the Bismarck, published just the year before.