Another thing that irritated me was the tagline for this movie: "Many saw evil. They dared to stop it." The line is incorrect on two fronts: one, the people involved with Operation Valkyrie were more upset Hitler was losing more and more battles and growing crazier; the second is that they failed. They didn't stop evil! They were executed! Anyone who thought this movie was going to end any differently is a moron. Then again, I guess saying, "They dared to try to stop it," or "They dared to die trying to stop it," doesn't sound as dramatic.

This aside, I went to see the movie, more out of curiosity than anything. I was mostly interested in seeing how they portrayed Hitler; anything else was extra. While I didn't come out of the movie thinking, "OH MY GOD THAT WAS THE BEST MOVIE EVER!!!" I did come out satisfied. David Bamber was eerily accurate as Hitler; honestly that was the most convincing one I've ever seen. I was fascinated and intimidated at the same time watching him on the screen, even though he wasn't on for very long. As for the rest of the cast, they weren't bad. Tom Cruise did better than I thought he was going to, and they had greats like Tom Wilkinson playing major roles. What really amazed me, beyond the fact that Tom Cruise wasn't acting like a moron in this movie, was Eddie Izzard's performance. If you know your British comedians, you'll be as shocked as I was to find out he had a role in Valkyrie. I didn't even recognize the cross-dressing smartass as General Erich Fellgiebel!

As for the acting itself, the characters were believable enough to make me suspend my disbelief, which is good enough for non-serious moviegoers. One slight thing that bothered me, however, was the fact that everyone had a different accent. Some had American accents, like Cruise, some had British accents, like Wilkinson, and I think I spotted a Polish accent and a few German ones. While I didn't expect everyone to speak German or even speak with German accents, it did throw me off at first to hear so many different ones. After a while I got used to it however, and I'd rather them nail the acting than make asses of themselves trying to sound German.

It's kind of hard to feel the tension when you know that the people involved lose and get killed, but they did a pretty decent job making me wonder how exactly the plan was going to fail when everything was looking up for them. Again, they weren't completely historically accurate, which was slightly irritating, but they have artistic rights to manipulate things to make it a more interesting story. The movie wouldn't have really had the (admittedly rahter small) impact it had on my emotions if they'd done it because they were tired of the way Hitler was running things. There were some really touching moments, and I did feel bad at the end, and the movie got me into it enough to mutter to myself when someone did something stupid or against what I probably would have done in the situation.

Overall, this movie may or may not have been worth the price to go to the movie and buy the soda I drank during it, but it was a pretty decent movie. I was impressed with the cinematography of the movie and the acting was better than I thought it was going to be. This would be a good rental movie, or if you're not terribly serious about movies and just like the experience of being in a theater, watch it while you can.

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