For an ending to a film with an anti-war message, I think it was perfect. It showed the pointlessness to the killing. In war, the heroes don't always survive, nor do they always die in a blaze of glory. They might get killed in a bomb blast moments after reaching home and concluding an epic adventure.
shareOm josh! Are you kidding me? Its the whole point of the story. War is futile. War is bad for everyone on both sides.
shareJust watched the Directors Cut. And the ending was simply dumb. I presume it was necessary so that killers wont get away alive. Cause indeed they murdered innocent civilians on that ships. And even let them drown when they could at least leave them a live boat there.
And at its core it was a successful mission for the Third Reich. The submarine crew sank a few allied ships and got away with it. And that couldnt be shown in post war Germany (the refurbishment of the war crimes were still going on in the 80s in Germany).
But .... for an anti war movie the ending failed. Cause at the home harbor they already arrived as "living deads". They all lost their direction in live and looked like corpses. Thats the perfect solution for a anti war movie ("War either kills you or at least your soul"). But instead killing them at the end just stated "Yep, people are killed during wars. What a bomb shell!".
While I don't think the ending was necessarily dumb, I also felt it was deliberately written to be more politically correct in 80s-era Germany and ensure that the movie was better accepted by the audience of WWII Allied countries. If the Third Reich submariners had lived on in the end, I doubt Hollywood would have bestowed the movie with six Oscar nominations.
shareNothing to do with political correctness and certainly absolutely nothing to do with "Oh no, what might Hollywood think?", as it was originally a book written before 1973 by Lothar-Günther Buchheim who was a war correspondent on multiple submarines.
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