Valkyrie

[Double dipped last night; Seven Pounds came from RedBox kind of randomly. I prefer RedMail myself.]

Considering some of the reviews this film got, I wouldn't have been surprised if the thing were a total trainwreck. Happily, it was not. The Tom Cruise character was portrayed as grotesque, to be sure, which I suppose might be laughable to some. But the other characters around Cruise helped create a sense of the tension, the sense of urgency these insurgents must have felt.

The film butts up to the Titanic problem, however, in that the entire audience knows the resolution to the story, and so at the climax, the viewer is left wondering not what is the resolution, but rather how will the inevitable play out? Here, there's not much doubt about how the Nazi regime would deal with traitors like this. So the story is left with is how emotionally sympathetic the characters are, in terms of the payoff for the audience. At least for me, in this film, I didn't feel connected enough to these characters to really be moved by their deus ex machina.