Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Clarissa Mora The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Andariel Halo this miniseries film is so outrageously over the top in dehumanizing Hitler as to make him into a cartoon character. Someone like Hitler was genuinely frightening, and movies like "Downfall" do an excellent job of portraying how he could so easily charm people, and also his delusions and irrational tirades and constantly blaming others that are disturbingly reminiscent of modern day leaders.Here, from childhood he's depicted as an uptight bratty phuc boi. The childhood is gone over in a semi-montage form, and from that point all throughout the WW1 sequences, every scene ends with you laughing at how absurd it's been.Robert Carlyle is utterly phenomenal as Hitler, managing to perfectly encapsulate his public persona and his speaking style and mannerisms. He does the absolute best with what the script and direction gives him, which means that there is no subtlety or humanity to this character at all. In his private moments, he's the same semi-coherent jibbering loon as in his public moments.At no point is there any reason given as to why people would flock to him over some other rabble-rousing speaker. He treats everyone with the sort of detached, pent-up hysterics of a bad imitation of a person with aspergers or some other odd personality disorder.Whether or not it would be accurate or true to Hitler's character can't fully be known, but the movie goes out of its way to only present Hitler as perpetually dumb, stupid, unbalanced, and shrill.Even if accurate to his personality and temperament (before the war and the drugs), the shrill, unsubtle way it's directed makes it come across like a psychotic anti-Hitler hit-piece not directed at condemning him for his evil actions, but basically just condemning him for being a loud-mouthed weirdo.The overall direction is done with a clumsy lack of any sort of subtlety or realism. Overly dramatic shots and musical cues are abundant, as if the characters are supposed to somehow know just how EEEEVIL Hitler is every time he's in the room. There's literally no redeeming characteristics of this depiction of Hitler.Real life Hitler loved dogs. The Hitler in this film is depicted violently whipping a dog for not sitting on his command.The man was responsible for tens of millions of deaths and a poisonously suicidal ideology that has managed to persist to this day, you don't have to invent reasons for us to hate him like this film seems to try to do.

BruceUllm It's remarkable how timely this 14-yr-old movie is. If you just imagine Hitler inveighing against the "Muslims" instead of the "Jews", you have Donald Trump. Also a bit scary. I am also struck by how imprecise Hitler was about how he planned to "make Germany great again". We, of course, found out how he went about that. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.The accompanying documentary about the making of the TV miniseries is very enlightening as well. I recognized Ocean Ave. in Santa Monica before the narrator identified it. The angst that the network had over such material was certainly understandable. The last thing you want to do is make Adolph Hitler appear sympathetic!

deco-irene I was really expecting a critically accurate analysis of Hitler's rise to power. Instead I got a political diatribe. We all know the evil that was done, but making up a fictional story to support an agenda is just plain wrong. It just plays into the hands of the Nazis and Neo-Nazis. They can point out all the inaccuracies in this movie and the accompanying documentary and say that Hitler was just misunderstood and that the Holocaust never happened (a prime example is Iran's Ahmadinejad). I believe the truth is far more sobering and frightening than what this movie portrayed, particularly because Hitler was very cool, logical and calculated in his rise to power. He was brilliant in his judgement of people and their desires and motivations. By downplaying his innate capabilities we're very likely to repeat this abhorrent chapter of history again. Look at the current situation in the US and the antisemitism that that is being espoused by our own government. There are so many parallels: the high unemployment, middle-class discontent, government handouts, hatred of Israel, incompetent governance, ...

t_atzmueller There were various reasons why it took me almost 10 years until I felt like watching this TV two-parter: for one, I'm from Germany and if you ever switched on German TV to some random channel, there's a good chance you'll get to see some Hitler film or documentary. "Hitler: What did the gardener know", "Hitler: Man or Demon", "Hitler: how guilty was his chauffeur", etc. Indeed, many of my countrymen have developed a certain Hitler-fatigue; or, as some acquaintance once said: "Another bloody Hitler documentary and I'll vote for some Nazi party in the next election". He was only half-joking.Second reason, I'm a little suspicious of none-German-speaking actors portraying the long-dead dictator. Anthony Hopkins: great actor but less than impressive playing Hitler. Same goes for Sir Alec Guinness or Frank Finlay. Call it a form of cinematic chauvinism but something doesn't sit quiet right with a "foreign Hitlers".Whether Robert Carlyle speaks with a broad Scottish accent, I cannot tell (having seen the film in dubbed German, where the accent is very authentic Bavarian/Austria) but it must be given to the actor: the plays one of the better Hitlers that far. Sure, Carlyle is no Bruno Ganz but Carlyle plays "the Fuehrer" to a tit, aided by an almost demonic stare that gave viewers the creeps in "Ravenous" just a few years earlier. At the same time, Carlyle doesn't portray the man Hitler as some super-evil fiend, rather showing us a bitter man, who is possessed entirely by his ideas, mental complexes and convictions – for better and, as we now know, for worst.What really strikes the eye is that few major characters physically resemble the real thing: Peter Stormare chillingly plays the brutal, psychopathic head of the SA-units and early Hitler-supporter but looks nothing like the real-life Ernst Röhm (who was short, overweight and effeminate). Worst yet are the depictions of Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess; unless they're addressed by name, you'd never guess their identity. Matthew Modine and Liev Schreiber are on auto-mode, but it seems to be the 'curse' of charismatic people with limited acting abilities that they repeatedly have to play themselves. Peter O'Toole as Von Hindenburg plays the role of dignified yet doomed-one-foot-in-the-grave character he's been playing for the last 15 odd years.Is there any deeper insight, do we learn something new about the person Hitler? No, not really. It's a historically accurate recounting of Hitlers rise to power, no more and no less. But, speaking as somebody who knows the city of Munich like the palm of his hand, the first part of the film almost had me convinced.I'd give it a decent 6.5 out of 10 points.