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Whether it's the gung-ho war reporter who quickly realizes that life on board is nowhere as glorious as Goebbels' propaganda films portrayed it, or the slow disintegration of the rich youth leader who voluntarily gave up a comfortable life abroad in order to serve his country, Das Boot proves that Petersen knows how to anchor plot in character development.

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The outcome is a cast of characters that is utterly believable - and hours before the movie draws to a close, worth caring about. While there is plenty of criticism of Hitler's regime to make sure no viewer could misunderstand the film as pro-Nazi, Petersen wisely stays away from painting any character as a stereotypical, emotionless national socialist. After years of war movies with Germans as heavies, Das Boot turned things upside down, giving German and international moviegoers a rare glimpse at war without the genre's typically black and white characters. Many of Germany's schools dealt with the nation's dark past in the '70s by hammering home the perils of overly nationalistic behavior and Germany's aggressive role in history, and thus created a generation of young Germans who found it hard not to cringe at the sound of the national anthem. The claustrophobic setting is heightened by fantastic camera work. Petersen somehow manages to make us feel boredom without being bored. Much like 1973's novel by Lothar-Gunther Buchheim, the extended edition artfully shows the excruciating wait and its impact on the crew. Relying on often unreliable and outdated intelligence information, searching for the enemy meant weeks of almost blindly circling convoy routes, waiting for new orders and hoping for an encounter. Unlike many 'more is more' cuts out there that add scenes better left on the cutting room floor, the longer Das Boot provides much better insight into the everyday life on a WWII submarine during the war. This is a great movie, from the wild party in La Rochelle at the beginning to the bitter end. The Movie First, the good: the extended cut is definitely the superior one of the three versions. Weighing in at 282 minutes, this second extended cut basically restores the TV version - unfortunately, both the good and the bad.

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For the reworked Director's Cut edition released in 2001, Petersen and crew added scenes from the TV series back in, completely retooled the sound, and cleaned up the often grainy footage to deliver a much more impactful experience. The original theatrical release was actually a pared down version of a six-part, five-hour mini-series shot for German television in 1981. Of course, 'original cut' isn't exactly the right term to use. Based on Buchheim's semi-autobiographic bestseller, the surprisingly taut war epic is filled with memorable and well-drawn characters, impressive action scenes, and a sense of claustrophobia that by far surpasses that of the original cut.

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