After a 105-day shoot, the filming of the TV sequel to the 1981 war epic Das Boot (lit. ‘The Boat’) has come to an end. It is scheduled to be broadcast on various Sky plc networks across Europe later in 2018.
While there have been plenty of television series set in World War II, from the comedic (Dad’s Army, Hogan’s Heroes) to the deadly-serious (Band of Brothers), seeing one which follows the perspective of the Germans – the official silver medalists in that conflict – is a rarity. This was perhaps made more palatable in the original film by the fact that the captain of the titular U-boat, and many of his crew, were openly embittered with both the war and the Nazi regime. The TV adaptation appears to be doubling down on this approach – whereas the film was set almost entirely in the claustrophobic confines of the U-boat, the series will also follow the activities of the anti-Nazi resistance movement in La Rochelle, the boat’s base.
The advantage of this present age of hour-long episodic TV shows is that it allows far deeper and more complicated narratives, purely due to having more material to work with. Das Boot is a particularly apt choice for this more expansive format, as the film’s theatrical release was pushing two and a half hours already – with the longest of the various director’s cuts coming in at nearer five hours. This cut was previously broadcast on the BBC as a miniseries – using the prefix ‘mini’ even though it consisted of three episodes of a hundred minutes apiece.
Rather than an adaptation, remake, or reboot, this series is a straightforward sequel to the original film. Set around a year later, in the autumn of 1942, it presents a stage of the war in which the Germans were on very different footing – the Allies had cracked the Enigma code, which marked the beginning of the end for the U-boats’ reign of terror in the Atlantic, and the resistance on mainland Europe was intensifying.
Like the original, the series is based upon Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s 1973 book Das Boot, but also incorporating elements of Buchhiem’s 1995 sequel Die Festung. It is directed by Austrian filmmaker Andreas Prochaska (The Dark Valley), and will star Rick Okon (The Invisibles), Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) and Robert Stadlober (Enemy At The Gates).
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