Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsA dramatic and astonishing look at the last days and hours of a gang of thugs and their leader
Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2015
Anthony Hopkins was once asked how he prepared for his performance as Adolf Hitler in the Fuehrer Bunker in the final days, and he said that he based it off an extremely annoying uncle he had.
The uncle must have been a very nasty character indeed, because Hopkins doesn't impersonate Hitler...he inhabits the role, and won the Emmy Award he so richly deserved for this movie.
I'll let others argue over who is the better Hitler: Alec Guinness in "Hitler: The Last Ten Days" or Hopkins in "The Bunker," or Bruno Ganz in "Downfall," but all are outstanding, handling the same subject in different ways.
This is film has a slightly different focus, looking a bit more at the various characters trapped in the Fuehrer Bunker with their deranged boss, most of whom were stuck there by duty and happenstance. For duty: the telephone operator, the maintenance man, Hitler's secretaries, cooks, and maids, the various generals and aides, who took down and passed on his increasingly insane orders. For happenstance: Hitler's fawning acolytes, like Joseph Goebbels and his whole family (who meet a ghastly fate), the crawling and creepy Martin Bormann, the slightly rational Albert Speer, and the bizarrely devoted Eva Braun.
Seeing these cutthroats and poltroons in the final hours of the Third Reich, as Hitler's demented dreams all come crashing down on their heads, makes you realize just how Nazi Germany's real evil was how it put the very worst people at the head of state: men and women without honor, without compassion, without empathy, without humanity, and let them and their bloodlust, kleptomania, paranoia, and greed loose upon the world, checked only by the massive force and determination of their enemies. Someone said that "A Police State is one where the police are criminals," and Nazi Germany was surely that, and "The Bunker" shows how it collapsed of a combination of its own failures and its enemies.
And it reminds us of something better: Gandhi's words that "All tyrants must fall."