Auschwitz (2011)

I sympathise with Uwe Boll, I really do. He is clearly a filmmaker with passion, and his reputation as “The Worst Filmmaker in the World^TM” is not entirely deserved; coming off the back of making a comical hash of some reasonably high-profile video game adaptations that had made him more than a little hated by self-righteous nerds everywhere, he was getting better. Tunnel Rats had been merely mediocre (which, given the competition, made it one of the best Vietnam war films ever made), revolting over-the-top comedy Postal had offered some genuine laughs between the grotesquery, and the likes of Far Cry and In the Name of the King had been no worse than your average Hollywood tripe. However…

Auschwitz opens with the director addressing the audience, first in German then English, explaining in fairly ineloquent terms why he had made this film – to educate the world. It is then followed by some obviously moronic teenagers failing to answer basic, asinine, leading and poorly-phrased (not to mention badly subtitled) questions about the holocaust. It is only after nearly 10 minutes that the “drama” begins, which is half-an-hour or so of mechanical “this is what happened at Auschwitz” footage. This is then followed by some more questions, this time answered by some slightly less brain-dead kids, and concluded by more Boll talking to the camera.

Ignoring the “documentary” parts (which is actually the majority of the film), the dramatised part is reasonably well shot and acted, but with dreadful editing which sadly makes the admirably restrained  performances of the gas chamber victims seems a little laughable. Unlike so much that Boll has done before, this is not gratuitous, quite the opposite in fact. As the director himself says at the beginning of the film, he is trying to show the reality, rather than tell stories of heroes as has been done in Schindler’s List and its kin. A noble intention, as the Spielberg’s film hardly did justice to the true nature of the holocaust, but in attempting to just flatly show the casual, business-like mass murder Boll fails to realise that just showing pictures of something does not convey the whole truth; the who truth can only be really appreciated by living those pictures, and that is why the more Hollywood-friendly holocaust films have focussed on just a few characters, drawing the audience into the world as much as possible.

Auschwitz is a quickie, shot with minimal budget and time, and bulked out by filler. Any good that could have been gained from just showing this film as a 30-minute short, or indeed by fleshing it out into a proper feature film, is entirely destroyed by the dull and patronising Q&A with the teenagers, which is only interesting for the somewhat darkly-comic irony that it demonstrates very clearly that the dim-witted kids and the clever kids can very easily be told apart based on appearance alone.

Uwe is right, the holocaust deserves better than the sentimental Hollywood treatment it’s been given thus far… but it sure as hell didn’t deserve this.

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