I must admit, I went to see Valkyrie more for professional script geek reasons than because of a burning desire to see the film.  Problem # 1 being that a story about an attempt to kill Hitler runs into interesting problems given (spoiler alert) the way World War Two turned out.  And Problem # 2: Bryan Singer has failed to impress since his debut feature, Usual Suspects.

So, how did the writers cope with the first issue, and was Singer able to overcome the second?  Well, Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander do a reasonable enough job, but there’s a sense that both they and Singer sense the weight of history on their shoulders, leading to portentuous lines such as Hitler’s “to understand National Socialism you need to understand Wagner”.  That may be a slight paraphrase, but only slight.  Oh, and Hitler is the only Nazi with a German accent.  The others are portrayed by British actors, except for the hero, Tom Cruise, whose American accent makes it clear he’s the good guy.

Nazis are a funny bunch: their stylish Hugo Boss uniforms make you think they’re heroic, but their tendencies to acts of appalling evil say otherwise.  Some of them, that is.  This film is rightly clear that there were good, bad and mediocre Nazis.  The good ones are out to rescue Germany from Hitler’s clutches, but it’s a difficult task when confessing to finding the Fuhrer lacking in any way was grounds for torture and possible execution.  Good thing that Tom Cruise is on hand to see the right way forward, though ‘hand’ is a word his character is probably sensitive about given he has three fingers in total.

Most of the time, he gets on fine with those three digits: he shaves and dresses himself perfectly well.  It’s only when he’s setting up a bomb designed to off Hitler that his lack of fingers becomes an issue, an indication of how rigidly functional this film is.  It can be seen in other respects too: when the Nazis gather together, they inevitably do so around a big map on a table, as they do in so many other war films.

For a story that’s in part about the humanity of the Germans in a time of terror, we don’t get to see much in the way of idiosyncratic, warm, human behaviour.  Rather, it’s all grim and focused.  And that’s kind of inevitable, given the choice to make the film a thriller in style.  I’m not convinced that was the best choice: compare the nuanced Germany you get to see in Polanski’s The Pianist with the relentlessly militaristic one in Valkyrie, and the former wins out for me as a picture of life under occupation by your peers.

The focus on the heroic nature of Cruise and his comrades sends out mixed messages that I find inappropriate in a film of this sort. Sure, we get to see some prevarication on the part of some of his colleagues, but that’s ascribed to them thinking politically rather than them having very human fears and differences of opinion.  The lack of that kind of shading weakens the film, but maybe subtlety is not what to look for in the director of X-Men and Superman epics.  It’d be interesting to know how much input Singer had into the writing process, and whether this project started as something more multi-faceted than what I saw on the screen.