As long as the earth remains, human conflict will never fully disappear. It is a part of our existence and oftentimes, we choose war as a means of resolution. For those who are unaware, war is brutal, destructive, exhausting, and, more often than not, utterly meaningless. However, humans always seem to find themselves in one conflict or the other. While some wars are localized, others have global ramifications and none quite as cataclysmic as World War II. The conflict played out across various locations across land, air and sea, reshaping the global order in its aftermath. Several creatives have told stories about the defining conflict of the 20th century, with Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 World War II picture Das Boot, one of them.
The Oscar- and Golden Globe-nominated masterpiece would go on to inspire a 2018 series of the same name, which continues to highlight the senseless reality of the entire conflict. With two storylines running parallel on land and sea, Das Boot sees its dialogue authentically switching between English, German, and French, even as the story follows the crew of a German U-boat embarking on its first voyage in 1942 and a young woman caught between the Gestapo and the French Resistance on land. The original Das Boot film from 1981 grossed $85 million, making it a global blockbuster and earningsix Oscar nominations. The film stands apart in the crowded sea of submarine war movies and the series is just as impressive.
Now, the 2018 Das Boot series is making a streaming return, having been on Hulu previously. According to a new report, Kino Lorber’s MHz Choice will have all four seasons of the classic WWII U-boat series, including ones that have never previously streamed in the U.S. MHz Choice will welcome the first season of the drama series on July 7 with the second season following on August 4, with two episodes, then installments launching weekly. However, the release dates for Seasons 3 and 4 have not been made available yet.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
Advertisement
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
Advertisement
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
Advertisement
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
Advertisement
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
Advertisement
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
Advertisement
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
Advertisement
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
Advertisement
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
Advertisement
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
Advertisement
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
Advertisement
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
Advertisement
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Advertisement
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Advertisement
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Advertisement
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Advertisement
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
Advertisement
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Who is Behind the Scenes for ‘Das Boot’?
A big-budget European show, Das Boot assembled an impressive cast from Germany, France, the UK and the US to tell its tale, including Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread), Tom Wlaschiha (Game of Thrones), Lizzy Caplan (Masters of Sex), Vincent Kartheiser (Mad Men), James D’Arcy (MARVEL’s Agent Carter), Thierry Frémont (Juste un regard), August Wittgenstein (The Crown), Rainer Bock (Inglourious Basterds), Rick Okon (Tatort), Leonard Scheicher (Finsterworld), Robert Stadlober(Summer Storm), Franz Dinda (The Cloud) and Stefan Konarske (The Young Karl Marx). Andreas Prochaska, whose credits include Das finstere Tal(The Dark Valley) and Das Wunder von Kärnten (A Day for a Miracle), directed the series with Tony Saint and Johannes W. Betz as the head writers.
Season 1 of Das Boot arrives on MHz Choice in the US on July 7. Stay tuned to Collider for updates.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login