You know, there are better submarine movies.
U-571 lot's of promise of action and adventure. What it delivered was a bunch of guys screaming about dieing for most of the picture.
So it's World War II. The German's have a great code system to keep the allies from snooping into their communications. The US Navy decides to steal the codes. Hey! Great idea! I won't point out yet that the enigma was not, in real life, grabbed by the Americans in WWII. I'll wait till later for this.
The Americans go off looking for a German sub, themselves disguised as a German sub supply vessel. Okay, this sounds wrong, I might be wrong here but you can't get that much stuff on a WWII sub. It would make a lousy supply vessel. The plan goes great, the Germans are caught off guard, and the Americans get the code books and the enigma machine. I will now point out that during WWII, the Americans never had possession of an enigma machine. In fact the British, who did have one, did not trust the Americans enough to even tell them about enigma's existence.
Just as the operation is being completed, an American Destroyer comes along and sinks the American sub, trapping the Americans on the German sub, whose controls and presumably the instruction book are all written in German.
The rest of the movie is just Americans screaming in English that they do not read German, and spectacular shots of the submerged submarines shooting torpedoes. I shall now also point out that WWII subs did not fire torpedoes below periscope depth. This being because the periscope was the devise used to aim the torpedo.
Nice idea! Just ... damn, it would be nice if anyone could have gotten any of the facts straight.
