Your Grandfather’s Super-villain: A Valkyrie Blu-ray Review

Rating:

If you’ve not seen Valkyrie—and you’re a comic fan or history buff of any kind—then you’ve made a mistake. Run down to the nearest video store (or better yet, have Amazon.com ship it right to your house!) and correct your error immediately. Why, you ask?

I found Valkyrie to be a thought-provoking film on several topics. This is the story of an attempt to off the biggest super-villain ever known, the Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler. Before writing this review, I took an informal survey, and (as I surmised) found that most people ranked Hitler as being more evil than Satan.

First, there’s the obvious question of how the world would have been different, had Hitler been killed earlier in the war. A cliché, everybody asks that. Next I considered how one person can really make a difference. Again, a cliché line of thought. My last generic thought was how you have to take chances in life, even if you fail.

But then it came to me… how would comic books be different now if Hitler had been assassinated earlier in the war? What if the leading hero Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, or other Germans like him, been successful in their attempt to off this madman? From Apocalypse to Doctor Doom to Darkseid, the ruthlessness, brutality and utter disregard for human life clearly (at least in my mind) been lifted from this man we define as evil. Sure, villians had existed in fiction prior to World War II, but I don’t recall any of those characters as having provided such a template for villainy. As you can probably guess, I’m a big fan of "What If?" type storylines.

Bryan Singer, best known to SRU readers as the director of the recent X-Men movies and Superman Returns, directed this film too. In fact, in one of the disc bonus featurettes, Singer discusses how his experience with superhero movies prepared him for taking on this historical action flick. It’s definitely a Singer-quality movie.

As a World War II history buff — one that admittedly (and embarrassingly) had never heard of Stauffenberg — I found most of bonus features were very interesting, as it delved deeper into the history of this plot and its main participants. Of all the bonus features I’ve seen on DVDs or Blu-ray discs in 2009, this is one of my favorites.

This movie, of course, was not without its share of scandal. Force yourself to forget that Tom Cruise is an overpaid Scientologist weirdo who married the hot jailbait from Dawson’s Creek. As some may remember, the German government had banned Cruise from filming at several locations due to his choice of religion. Was that ever resolved, were they eventually allow to shoot at those location? If not, did it change the script any? Although I can understand the studio omitting the events, I’m still disappointed that none the many featurettes on the Blu-ray mentioned (even with one sentence) how those issues played out. I shouldn’t be forced to search Google. And after a few failed searches, I still don’t know what happened.

In terms of the "conspiracy suspense", it was pretty weak. I had expected something along the lines of latter-season Justice League Unlimited episodes.