While I was aware of the attempted coup and assassination this movie was based on, it was little more than a few shows on The History Channel some years back, and when I heard they were making a movie about these events, I got really interested. The basic premise is that a disenfranchised Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) joins and takes over an existing resistance movement and takes the group's failed attempts to remove Hitler from power to the next level. During the fight in North Africa, Stauffenberg is seriously wounded. When he makes it out of the country, he is less one eye, one hand and two additional fingers, but he doesn't let this keep him down. He gets transferred back to Berlin and gets accepted into a secret group containing Major-General Henning von Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh), General Friedrich Olbricht (Bill Nighy), Dr. Carl Friedrich Goerdeler (Kevin McNally) and Colonel General Ludwig Beck (Terence Stamp). Stauffenberg's idea was to take an existing plan and use it to their advantage.
Basically, Hitler's Operation Valkyrie allowed for a reserve army to quickly take over the country (and occupied areas) in the case of an emergency. With a few changes, Stauffenberg would make it so that Hitler's State Security (the SS) would be left out of the loop, and with this change, Stauffenberg could use Valkyrie to claim the SS were behind a major coup and remove Stauffenberg's only real opposition from power. There are just two major obstacles: Hitler and the head of the Reserve Army, Colonel General Friedrich Fromm (Tom Wilkinson). But once Hitler is dead and the Reserve Army is in place, Stauffenberg and the rest of the resistance would be able to establish a new government and sue for peace before the Allied Forces arrive in Berlin.
What I was mostly familiar with before this movie involved the actual assassination attempt where Stauffenberg walks into Hitler's bunker and tries to blow him up with a small explosive. What I wasn't aware of was the deep political plot surrounding this attempt, but after reading up on the subject and watching the documentaries and featurettes that come with this movie, I was just amazed by how closely writers Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and Nathan Alexander portrayed these events. The crew was so dedicated to keeping this film as authentic as possible, it was pretty much completely filmed in Berlin in the very buildings the events being portrayed took place. One of the featurettes even talks about the people of Berlin as they watched the NAZI flags fly again and hope that the movie being made shows that not everyone in Germany was a NAZI and how not everyone was like the images being portrayed around the world.
I enjoyed all of the featuettes in this Blu-ray release. Not only were the standard making-of features enjoyable (especially the ones talking about the research that went into the film and what it took to get to the locations they wanted to shoot in), but the documentary on the resistance this film is based on clocks in at just under two hours and it is really comprehensive. Also included is a short featurette hosted by Stauffenberg's grandson as he takes viewers through Berlin to many of the locations used by the resistance while plotting their coup. It's all really good.
World War II fans (both of the fiction and non-fiction) should find a lot to enjoy in Valkyrie. There are enough action sequences to warrant the high definition viewing and both the acting and story are rock solid. While not for everyone, simply because not everyone enjoys WWII stories, most people will enjoy at least seeing Valkyrie once or twice.
