U-571: Diesel-Driven Fun

Rated PG-13

Man, I love submarine movies. I love seeing captains hunched over periscopes. I adore watching mechanics trying to get more steam out of diesel engines. I can’t get enough of guys shooting at other guys with torpedoes.

And what makes my submarine movie fascination even better is that I’m absolutely petrified of real submarines. I know what gets me, too — the water pressure. I’ve seen what water pressure can do to a Styrofoam beer cooler. I’d like to keep it from squishing my internal organs, thank you very much.

Which leads me to U-571. Gotta love a submarine movie that asks me to leave my brain at the door. Every once in a while, a person needs to see a movie that doesn’t require them to do anything with their brain. If every movie were American Beauty, I think I’d get a brain clot.

U-571 tells the story of a group of American soldiers assigned to steal the German Enigma code machine — which threatened to keep the good guys from winning World War II — from a German U-boat. Second-in-command Andrew Tyler (Matthew McConaughey, one of the leaders on my Reading-From-A-Phone-Book list) heads the group. Tyler just missed out on getting his own ship, because his commander (Bill Paxton) said Tyler isn’t ready to send soldiers to their deaths. Nice guy, huh?

Anyway, off they go to the U-boat, where in the middle of a hurricane — well, I don’t know if it was or if it wasn’t, but it looked like a hurricane — Tyler’s team gets stranded on the U-boat when the German resupply sub shows up and blows up the U.S. sub. That leaves nine guys stuck on this broken sub trying to evade the Germans.

One of the main reasons I loved this movie was the German accents, words, language, yadda yadda. Man, I love the German language. I have no idea why, but German and British accents turn me into icky little pools of goo on the floor. I’m a quarter German. Maybe that’s it. Yeah, that’s the ticket. It’s genetic. But hey, that’s just me.

Okay, so the characters are walking cardboard cutouts. So if you think it out, it doesn’t work. My personal favorite flaw was that if you turned on a diesel engine underwater, your eyeballs would get sucked out of your head. But honestly, who cares?

How many movies without brain cells are this much fun? And face it, Matthew McConaughey looks faboo in a crewcut. (Matthew, if you’re out there, I know you’re single, I know I’m single, and I think I could like a guy who plays the bongos naked.)

Jennifer Matarese