I hadn't been to the movies in a while, and so I went, but most things didn't look so good. Red One looks like a corporate-committee-designed holiday-action fusion movie, that I might, nonetheless, see at a later date. Gladiator II is a completely unnecessary sequel to a movie that did not impress me nearly as much as it did so many others, and in hindsight, I am starting to think that Ridley Scott is actually a pretty shitty storyteller. I ain't in it for the cinematography and camera angles and whatnot. I want a good story, and unless he's going off a book someone else wrote (The Martian, Exodus, Robin Hood, Black Hawk Down), Ridley doesn't do that anymore. And he's REALLY not good at sequels, like Hannibal or Alien:Covenant. So, no Gladiator 2.

Wicked also came out this week.

LoL. No.

So what was left was Bonhoeffer, a biopic about the eponymous German WW2 dissident. Which the title made sound rather exciting.

It was not.

First of all, it's told out of sequence, with the framing device being his recollections and musings in Nazi prison. We flash back to his childhood with a really, really extended scene of him playing hide and seek with his older brother in 1914, than cut to a scene where the brother goes off to war. Guess what happens to him. He has a couple of cheesy conversations with his mother in order to set up an in-joke for late, then we jump to the adult Dietrich Bonhoeffer attending a seminary in NY city, where he gets bored of the stuffy academia and befriends a local Baptist student and they go to his church and he learns about jazz and gospel music and also racism. Then he goes home and has a lot of arguments with people about Hitler, and goes back to America because the heat is on and then he goes back to Germany. Along the way he starts a secret seminary for good ministers, until the Nazis close it down, and then he is recruited into a resistance movement and is the first one to volunteer when they start talking about assassinating Hitler. At this point the movie threatened to get exciting, but by volunteering to help assassinate Hitler, he gives a personal sermon to Rudi Gersdorff before his bomb vest attempt. We get to see Rudi's mission, and thematically appropriately for this movie, we get to see it fizzle out, too. Literally. Then he preaches some more, has more conversations with friends and family and then he is being arrested, and at some point we are caught up with the interludes of him writhing around on his cell bunk or arguing with his cellmate, a cynical Nazi war crime scientist who is only in there because he fell out of favor with Hitler.

The film drags and doesn't ever give a clear sense of time and place. Basically, you know we're in America if there are lots of black people, and Germany when there are mostly white people on the screen. Unless it actually comes up in the conversation, you're not sure which scenes cover his visit to England. You don't know who anyone else in the film is, until one of them starts giving a sermon about his own shortcomings, and it turns out this is Martin Niemoller. This guy has been hanging around with Dietrich since he got back to Germany from his first visit to America and have been arguing about the prudence of "the church" taking a stand against the Nazis & Hitler. Martin Niemoller is a major character in the film, but you don't realize this until he says the lines for which he became famous.

They make a big deal about the founding of the Confessing Church, and the Nazis' efforts to create a state religion, which rather muddles the motivations of the clergymen (women in this movie are black, members of the Bonhoeffer family or Clementine Churchill [because it seems to be a law of Hollywood that her husband has to be crowbarred into any film set in the 30s or 40s], and certainly not characters with agency or plot relevance, thank you) with politics and self-interest, instead of simple moral and theological opposition.

Another issue is the German cast in an American production. The writer, director & producer of this film is an American who wrote the movie about Chesley Sullenberger with Tom Hanks and Aaron Eckhart, and it's in English, not translated or dubbed, but almost all of the actors are German, and thus in every conversation, zay haf zee German ahkzent. Zee ahkzent is de same ven de zeen iss in Amereeka talking viss de black people and ven dey are ahl Germans talkink to each other in, presumably, German. I came for a movie with the words Spy and Assassin in the title, not to have a Modernist, generic Hollywood-Christian sermon hissed at me for two hours. The one actor I'd ever seen before was Clarke Peters, playing Bonhoeffer's American mentor, but Peters in English (though he is most famous for playing Americans and does a very good accent), so it's not like they were hardcore committed to accurate nationalities for actors and characters.

BTW, I saw after watching the movie, that people are complaining that the movie has distorted Bonhoeffer's story into a right-wing agenda. Speaking as a practicing Christian and right wing extremist, I didn't see it. Bonhoeffer comes across as the kind of hippy leftist pseudo Christian who wants to toss all the actual religion out in order to sit around yammering about love, just a generation early. I am not sure what Christian nationalism is, or how it applies to this film, aside from possibly, if you squint, there is something of a cautionary tale about the government taking over religion, but that's basically been a settled issue, for my religion, at least, since Canossa and Thomas a Becket, in the 11th & 12th centuries. "Hey, wait, look what the Nazis are doing" is, like, short-bus levels of slow on the uptake. Speaking of which, the historical Niemoller, who disappears after his arrest in the film, is another case, who utterly failed to apply the lesson he famously claimed to have learned, and went about shilling for other totalitarian regimes.

Anyway, despite being released by Angel Studios, who got attention with The Sound of Freedom last year, there isn't anything particularly right-wing or Christian about this movie, unless you subscribe to the very specific (non)theology of the protagonist. This feels very much like another example of ideologically-driven filmmaking that prioritizes expressing their beliefs over telling a coherent story and character arcs. I wrote a post about ten years ago complaining about this with a slew of Christian movies I had seen at the time. It's basically the same thing with the woke-ification of Star Wars, Marvel, WoT and Lord of the Rings.