I wanted to but couldn't!

Fresh and Exciting

Absolutely Fantastic

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Fatherland is a simple movie, it doesn't touch on particularly deep themes and there's not a whole lot of depth or subtlety to the plot, but therein lies the charm.Seeing Fatherland reminded me of Threads (another made-for-TV film from a decade earlier) in that they're both simple films that somehow manage to have more coherent scene structure and pacing than many films released today.Isn't it lovely when what's shown on screen makes a bit of basic sense?The overdubbed child actor and heavy handed third act does bring down the overall impression however.

Okay, to dig holes in what would make a glorious 'what if..?' means to do just that, dig holes. Apart from good performances from Rutger Hauer and Miranda Richardson and the rest of the cast, even if you accept the changearound, it's still too laughable around the historical facts we DO know about.Germany has won the war (Nazi Germany - that's important!). It's 20 years on, Churchill has buggered off to Canada leaving a capitulated Britain and guess what, America pulled out of Europe in the all - important 1944 and decides on a 'kind of' pact with Nazi Germany (As if - I know the west encouraged Saddam Hussein on the throne then kindly made him look the enemy, but this is still stretching it). Oh and by the way, Der Fuhrer, yes, the same one, Adolf Hitler is still alive at 75 (Nice catchphrase). A young American journo, Miranda Richardson is covering the forthcoming state visit of American president Joe Kennedy (It is fictional, remember) where Hitler will negotiate further with him on their wonderful pact, which incidentally, forgets that Germany is STILL fighting the war in Russia. (Maybe this is meant to show America's hate of commies and they'd rather except Nazism - another 'as if'!). In actual fact America's contrast is that the world knows nothing of the concentration camps/Nazi atrocities etc, which are about to come out in the plot. SS Chief of Police, Xavier March (Rutger Hauer) teams up with Miranda Richardson's 'Charlie MacGuire' after a lot of new facts surface and deaths occur within the Nazi idyll (Yes, idyll, another what if, as if). March finds himself isolated, on the run, because, even 20 years ago, when he served the Fuhrer lovingly in the navy, (Like they all did and denied later) he's disillusioned with the cover up of the systematic brutality of the Nazi regime. Had he known, he says, he wouldn't have served his beloved leader (Not in my name etc). He's presented with photos of the death camps that Charlie has unearthed and they both end up running from the SS/Gestapo. They manage to hand the pics to the president just as he's going to meet Hitler on a kind of Nuremburg platform. Then the deal's off, of course and a footnote, from March's son, whom he tried to abscond with, with Charlie to the USA says it's then that the Nazi regime collapses - because America knows now, or because ordinary Germans can't abide what had happened - not fully explained! We're led to believe the former, methinks!This is tripe of the first class. Firstly, it forgets Hitler had Parkinson's disease and must have had a miraculous recovery. Another fairyland tale is Hauer's sympathetic SS officer. That's an SS officer - the daily indoctrination of Aryan supremacy, untermenschen and fanaticism never featured in his upbringing nor had any influence on the fact he's made it to an SS police chief! Other factors including mention of the Americans dropping the atom bomb on Japan defy belief that if they had it they wouldn't have threatened Germany with it and would rather pull out of Europe. Another crappy piece is, I know that WE know the holocaust happened, but the presentation of the photos to Joe Kennedy showing a few emaciated bodies, however familiar to us, didn't, in reality, mean they had been instigated by the Nazis, in a big enough form. Nor was the way Charlie broke the cordon, just by pushing through and getting to the President believable - okay, I know someone shot Lincoln and Reagan, but still!It was a very cheap and poor production, with about a handful of 'Germans' making up for a crowd scene of Nuremburg-like proportions. It had all the premise of a TV movie and it shows. About the only saving grace for me, was that it showed Hitler's utopian new Berlin , or 'Germania' as he intended it named. It showed his and Speer's visionary architectural fatherland - sorry - fairyland and it's only for that that I gave this a 'four'!

A great book has been completely desecrated by this movie. The filmmakers have created a sort of 'soap opera thriller' that has absolutely nothing to do with the outstanding novel it is supposed to be based on. Where are the wonderfully described murky atmospheres of the book, the gray shades of everyday life in post WW2 Nazi Germany that are so vivid in the book you can feel them, they are almost palpable. Where is the suspense, where is the thriller?Unfortunately, none of this is present in the movie, which spends far too much time in explaining to the viewers that R. Hauer is a good Nazi, showing him being a good father to his kid, etc... The film lacks also in pace, it lacks credibility (the depiction of the Nazis, the SS, the Gestapo, etc. is nothing less than grotesque, totally unreal), it seems as if the director actually never even read the book... And then the ending to top it all off... What a pity. Maybe someone in the future will attempt a second filming of this novel with better success. Let's hope so...

Fatherland by Robert Harris is truly one of the best novels ever written and I did find myself thinking "this could be a great film one day" many times while reading it. I was therefore delighted to see it made but disappointed with the result.Most of the actors work for me - this is a film that should be cast with Europeans - especially Rutger Hauer (ever growing in stature as an older statesman) as Xavier March. But one big flaw is the lack of chemistry with Richardsson.But this is a book that deserved the big screen and a well known director. Lets hope for a re-make.It must also be said that one of the most disappointing facts about the movie is how the film never really portrays the Berlin and Germany of a victorious Third Reich well enough. The monumental architecture that is so well described in Harris's book (taken from the historical facts of Hitler and Speer's plans) never really gets a fair showing. Just imagine what Industrial Light and Magic could do with this.