User Reviews

This review might be more about Johann Georg Elser than this particular movie. He is one of the shining lights in the darkest hour of German history, though Stauffenberg gets all the attention. People seem to forget that Stauffenberg gladly went to war and followed Hitler until he realised that the war would be lost. That's not a hero in my book. Elser, though, is. He decided that Hitler had to be stopped and tried to do so on his very own. As another reviewer on here saw fit to mention that Elser's bomb attack might have been staged by the SS, I feel forced to mention that these claims have been found unfounded some time ago (1964), when the Gestapo's interrogation files were examined.

As for the film, well, I think the acting is pretty good, so is the directing, but it has to be mentioned that it is a bit strange at times. What I absolutely didn't like about this film was that it didn't follow the truth. It might be necessary to add a few things here and there to make Elser's story dramatic enough to fill a feature-length film, though. There is absolutely no evidence that Elser had a fiancée at the time. The same goes for many of the other entanglements we can see on the screen. Disappointing, really. I personally would have preferred a film much closer to actual events. There also exists another film about Elser from the 1960's, which might be closer to what I had hoped to see, but it seems impossible to get hand on that.

tl;dr Elser was a fine man, Stauffenberg not so much. This film adds too much fiction to the real story.

This film is brilliantly made, and should be seen by more people.

It is very powerful in the way it shows one brave man's lone attempt to stop the Nazis in their tracks and Brandauer perfectly conveys the sense of silent outrage against the atrocities he sees rising around him.

It is heartbreaking to discover that he was executed weeks before the liberation by the Allies, and that no memorial exists to commemorates him to this day.

Everyone should see this film.

Also, the fact it is filmed on location in Germany makes it very atmospheric and you can feel the climate of fear and suppression very plausibly more so than in many other films set in this era.

Dennehy and LeVaillant are convincing as the Nazis.

This movie is a commendable attempt at telling the story of a simple, yet brave man and thus well-deservedly (50 years later!) commemorating his (albeit futile, by an absurd delay of seven minutes)attempt at assassinating Hitler. For this reason alone, this movie must be praised. One should, however, never confuse the contents (in this case: the political statements of a movie), with the form (viz. the style and craftsmanship with which a movie is made).

Keeping this in mind, "Georg Elser" is _not_ a good movie. It suffers from a very unsophisticated screenplay which very often most gruffly connects scenes without any elegance, which includes many characters that aren't fully developed at all (e.g. the Brian Dennehy character is quite unfinished which is all too bad considering the enormous abilities of this actor, the same goes with the Vadim Glowna character). Worst of all, the movie is very poorly directed. Brandauer as an actor is flawless as usual, he gives a good performance as "Elser", but his directing is pretty bad. Given the fact that Brandauer had such remarkable men at hand as cinematographer Lajos Koltai (the images in this movie are very beautiful - the autumnal tints convey a certain feeling of doom) or composer Georges Delerue (a beautiful title theme), the overall result is most disappointing. There are many sequences lacking proper editing (shots that are way too long and thus very tiresome), there are other sequences which do not seem to make too much sense at all (e.g. several haphazardly combined shots in the Bürgerbräukeller), the storyline is never sufficiently tense.

It is a pity: This movie could have been far better in the hands of a qualified director.