First of all, I have to say in Uwe Boll's favor that I am completely against smear campaigns that discredit the entire body of work from a filmmaker only because he made 2 or 3 really bad movies. Unfortunately, "Auschwitz" comes close to that description too. The film starts with Boll saying something about his film and also ends with it. I personally find this a very annoying watch and it has a narcissistic take in my opinion. This is just personal perception though, but I think this stuff should be on DVDs as commentary or something like that. What is not subjective is the fact that Boll delivers pretty much nothing of substance in his monologues and his English is also really bad. He should not have done it I think. Then there are two sequences of classroom action when we hear Boll ask questions about Auschwitz, the Holocaust and Nazis to German students. It becomes obvious that most of them are really not that educated on the subject. Some are, but most are not.
This is the premise that Boll uses as the motivation to make this film. The long middle sequence of the movie depicts the re-enacted action from the concentration camp in Auschwitz. It is very graphic, but that should not come as a surprise with Boll behind the film. We see people die in gas chambers. We see a young boy being shot in the head by a Nazi officer. Sadly, we do not really learn anything in this middle sequence. I am fairly certain there was nothing in there you would not know by now and I refuse to believe that students were really that limited in terms of knowledge about concentration camps. In my opinion, the interviews with the student were entirely or almost entirely scripted.
All in all, it's not a complete failure of a film and I agree that it is certainly difficult to bring something new to the subject with the hundreds of films and documentaries that already exist about it, but it was still a very unrewarding watch. This is a bit of a shame as the cast was not entirely bad. I believe Arved Birnbaum for example is a talented actor. But he has little to work with here with Boll's script. So yeah, the best thing is probably that this film does not even run for 70 minutes, so it does not drag at least for the most part. The worst is probably the parts during which Boll elaborates in a cringeworthy manner on why he made this film very early. As a whole, not recommended.
This is the premise that Boll uses as the motivation to make this film. The long middle sequence of the movie depicts the re-enacted action from the concentration camp in Auschwitz. It is very graphic, but that should not come as a surprise with Boll behind the film. We see people die in gas chambers. We see a young boy being shot in the head by a Nazi officer. Sadly, we do not really learn anything in this middle sequence. I am fairly certain there was nothing in there you would not know by now and I refuse to believe that students were really that limited in terms of knowledge about concentration camps. In my opinion, the interviews with the student were entirely or almost entirely scripted.
All in all, it's not a complete failure of a film and I agree that it is certainly difficult to bring something new to the subject with the hundreds of films and documentaries that already exist about it, but it was still a very unrewarding watch. This is a bit of a shame as the cast was not entirely bad. I believe Arved Birnbaum for example is a talented actor. But he has little to work with here with Boll's script. So yeah, the best thing is probably that this film does not even run for 70 minutes, so it does not drag at least for the most part. The worst is probably the parts during which Boll elaborates in a cringeworthy manner on why he made this film very early. As a whole, not recommended.