The author hates this version,REMAKE???

It is true it had a smallish budget and they changed the plot a little but it is better than having no film at all.

Yeah, that sums up my feeling about the movie. It ain't bad, but it could have been so much better.

One thing that bothers me about the film is the casting. The funny thing is that I'm usually not the type to worry too much about whether actors playing fictional characters are physically right for their parts; I'd rather see a good performance from an actor who doesn't look the part than a mediocre performance from someone who does.

But Harris relied so much on physical typecasting in the book that it's hard to separate the physical description from the character. In the book, March is a slender guy of average height, while Jaeger is huge -- they're even nicknamed "the fox and the bear" by their colleagues. Globus? Imagine that a sculptor were to depict an aging NFL football player using chunks of raw liver. Nebe is almost a dried up little lizard. Et cetera.

If Harris hadn't used these physical stereotypes, or if he had done so only for one or two characters, it might not be an issue in the movie ... but he did. To me, watching the movie feels like watching a play where all the parts are played by understudies -- a good performance, but somehow it's not quite what it should be.

I wish Harris had written more novels with the same premise from Fatherland, that Nazi Germany had survived WWII. Either with the same main character, or a different one. If he really wanted a good cinematic version of his concept, he should have written a series of stories and a subsequent one could have been made.



"Shake it, but don't break it. Wrap it up...and I'll take it!"