U-571

In screenwriting there is an unwritten rule of sorts: If there are three (or more) names on a given script it means there are three (or more) names not on said script. That said we can take note of the three credited names on "U-571", assume there were at least three more uncredited screenwriters, and conclude this script was so bad to begin with no amount of credited (or uncredited) rewriting will make it acceptable.

"U-571" is the prime example of late of this rule, the first in what is certain to be a long, long list of spring and summer big-budget, small-minded, launches targeting aggressive males.

"U-571" is bad. Very bad. Bad, bad, bad. So bad, in fact, I had to wonder what studio executives were thinking when they gave the green light for this project. The principal characters, are, at best, tolerable, the action gleaned, lifted, and obviously stolen from classic submarine films the likes of "Das Boot" and "The Hunt for Red October", and the effects, well, to classify them special is to admit to being a willing idiot.

Which, apparently, is the basic demographic of this movie: The willing idiot who will forgo plausibility for action, action, action.

Matthew McConaughey stars as Lt. Tyler, a strapping young man with ambition, who is overly confident--he thinks he is ready for his first command.

Not so, replies Lt. Cmdr. Dahlgren (Bill Paxton). He thinks Tyler has a way to go. Which is why he didn't recommend his second-in-command for such a post.

And how do we know this? Well, there is this dance party at which all the Navy studs look oh-so handsome in dress whites, where this information is conveyed, just before they get called back to the boat to answer an emergency call.

Their mission is thus: A German U-boat is floundering in the mid-Atlantic. On board is the highly secret Enigma machine, which is used to crack codes and cipher messages (and, probably, make espresso). Dahlgren, Tyler, and Co. are to disguise their U.S. sub as a Nazi vessel, get to the U-boat before the German rescuers do, impersonate Germans, capture the sub with a boarding party, grab the machine, and sink the sub so no one knows what really happened.

But, protests one of the Americans. We're not fighters or Marines.

Neither is the other crew, says a Marine fighter, who just happens to be aboard, who is present, apparently, to convey these mission directives.

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