Downfall

Downfall is great. Fascinating, horrible, insane, claustrophobic, well-made. I am not entirely sure whether the movie portrays Hitler as the insane person he clearly was, or whether it humanizes him. It does, but the fact that he's a friggin' insane person doesn't entirely help. Yeah, the people who surrounded him at the end were just as insane as he was, mainly, so just showing him going about his business with a bunch of crazy people will make him seem less insane. Put him together with a bunch of normal people, then he is clearly the nutter he was. There's really not that much else to say, considering the film ends the way it does. A lot of reviews out there blame the film for humanizing Hitler, but it does only to people who are capable of forgetting not only the history not entirely stated in the film, but also the touches added where Hitler complains about the international Jewish conspiracy. They're all insane in the film, it's just the one's who start to feel bad about it that you start to feel for. And then you see the SS uniform and realize that no one is free from guilt. Although Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary, was young and unaware of what was going on, she clearly recognized, before the end, that she should have figured out about the Holocaust.