The Film Downfall

Film has the ability to capture events in time that visual narrate suffering, pain, honor, and death. These elements of the human experience separates photography and cinema from other art forms, as the viewer witnesses what they believe is untampered truth. So what better way to visually document and tell the story of the greatest war ever fought in modern time, World War II. This war was of biblical proportions with over 72 million casualties and scares that were felt in almost every part of the world form Europe, China, Middle East, North Africa, South-East Asia and the Pacific. World War II set a script of tremendous magnitude that any director would love to depict with names like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Gen. Patton, and Gen. Eisenhower leading the allied forces against the evilness set by the axis forces of Hirohito’s Japan, Benito Mussolini’s Italy, and the most villainous of all Germany’s Adolph Hitler. There have been numerous films depicting Hitler and his Nazi regime including his own propaganda films that helped persuade a

It takes place almost entirely inside a bunker beneath the city of Berlin, where Adolph Hitler and many people within his inner circle are spending their final moments. The only time the viewer is taken outside the bunker is to show the overgrowing collapse of the Nazi defense of the city and like many other anti-war films Downfall depicts the chaos brought on the city with the Russian army’s continuous aerial bombardment. These scenes outside the bunker also reveal some of the anti-messages within the film as it depicts loyal German civilians and their attempts to fight off the Russians until death. Director Oliver Hirschbiegel does a fantastic job of revealing the chaotic nature of war outside the bunker and within as the nature of war is now more politically and above all mentally