User Reviews

"Der Untergang der Pamir" is a German film from 2006, so this one had its 10th anniversary last year. It was written by Fritz Müller-Scherz, who has had a long career in the film industry, not only behind the camera, but also as an actor. The director is Kaspar Heidelbach and if you see some of the other stuff he worked on, then your expectations here should not be as high. I would not say the outcome was disastrous or anything, but yeah I am sure the story would have deserved better execution. But first things first: This one here consists of a pretty long 3 hours as a whole, so it is basically a two-part mini-series put together by two episodes of 90 minutes each, which means you can definitely want to watch the entire thing in one sitting if you have the required patience. You will probably need it as this film is far from quality filmmaking and more on the simple than interesting side. The main characters are played by Klaus J. Behrendt, who is okay, and Jan Josef Liefers, who is embarrassingly bad and he has a tendency to go over the top frequently just like he does in here too. The writing isn't helping him either as the almost God-like way in which his character was written apparently motivated me to go even more ham. Supporting performances come from Dietmar Bär (interesting Tatort reunion with Behrendt, but otherwise pointless), Max Riemelt who they tried to include as a core character early on too, but quickly gave up when they realized it isn't happening, Tobias Schenke, who is once again completely forgettable and probably only the lack of screen time kept him from being bad. And there are other known faces for German film buffs playing minor characters and I won't go into detail on them. And there is Herbert Knaup, an actor I certainly respect, but I have no idea why he accepted the role as he was written just as badly as everything else and his transformation into responsibility, into altruism even, when the flood hits the deck does not feel authentic at all taking into account everything we saw before that.

I personally believe that these three hours could easily have been fit into 100-110 minutes, maybe even less with them leaving out the many many insignificant and pointless parts and characters. But even that more focused version would not have resulted in a quality film, just into one that may not be as high on the irrelevant scale. It's sadly another example of a German small screen film focusing on catastrophe and disaster that did not work out at all. Frequently these use references to actual events and so it was done in this one too in a desperate attempt to give the film any cultural or historical importance that they were unable to achieve on a cinematic level and I must say my 4/10 rating is still very much on the generous side. It is probably even worse. Apart from that, I think they should have called it "Die Pamir" because that way we at least would not have seen the sinking coming as the Pamir is not even known here in Germany, so it is another failure that they included a huge spoiler in the title, which would have been fine if the build-up to the actual sinking would have been handled well, but far from that actually. Anything good to say about the film? It wasn't too bad in terms of the visual side, such as effects, costumes and maybe cinematography too. This also makes it a work of style over substance too, so yes the negative here is definitely more frequent than the positive and you really should skip it. Liefers' performance/character alone is enough for a thumbs-down actually.