It's been true about them ever since they were actually walking around in reality. It's even truer since they faded into history. It was true in Star Wars. It's true in Mel Brooks' parody of Star Wars, and a whole bunch of his other films besides. It's true in Indiana Jones. In a way it's true on Seinfeld. Even Charlie Chaplin found it to be true. Poor old Leni Riefenstahl knew it was true, personally, then spent the rest of her life paying the price.
What is it? Nazis make for good cinema!
It makes sense, really. A bunch of guys running around in the 20th century, with mechanized warfare and a world view that would've fit in perfectly well in Genghis Khan's time. It's as if a writer for a video game made them up and they escaped through a time portal into the 1st half of the 20th century.
Why do I even bother with posts like this? Automatic Godwin's!
(Standard Godwin's Disclaimers: Nazis were real and as evil as you can get. The Holocaust actually happened.)
They're also the "safe bad guy" - you can make Nazis the villain in your movie / game and no one will complain (except don't show the swastika, ss in some countries.)
Spielberg promised not to use Nazis as a trope after Schilder's list, and the last Indy movies suffered for it. Using commies as the enemy seems so dated and Jingoistic, even though the conflict was more recent.
Yes, but the "safe" aspect is only a side benefit. Artistically, they're perfect. Really, the more you think about it, the more it seems like a video game or comic book writer made them up and they escaped into reality and stole a time machine.
They were into the occult and old Nordic/Germanic mythology. They were developing and had bonafide super-science weapons: jets, ICBMs, and stealth aircraft while some of their opponents early in the war were still using cavalry charges. There was real-life superscience intrigue involving highly gifted super-geniuses. This intrigue involved nuclear weapons. They were urgently bent on world domination -- not as an eventual goal or as a someday-daydream wish, but as an urgent we-need-to-do-this-ASAP real-world project.
They also seem to be securely in the top 5% of everyone fictional or real as far of level of atrocities goes.
Curious turn of phrase, considering that one of the most enduring legacies of the Nazis is their sense of taste. The Nazis had a very Platonic idea of the purpose of art and everything that they touched was imbued with their aesthetic. From the parades, to the propaganda leaflets, there was a uniform sense of purpose and higher meaning.
Hitler himself began as a starving artist and when he took over he made everything his. He was, arguably, the most successful art-critic of the 20th century.
Yeah, and then after the Berlin wall fell, action movies couldn't even go to communists for villains. So now it's just various vaguely European / Middle Eastern bad guys.
Nazis are an American cinema cliche, often used in good cinema. But I think this has rather less to do with Nazis themselves and more to do with the film business. Soviets and asian communists as bad guys didn't work because there were pervasive socialist sympathies in the film industry. It just doesn't fly when your coworkers have party contacts (no, Mccarthy was not just crazy). The other thing is the film business is heavily Jewish. If for some reason the movie business was heavily Finnish or Latvian I'm sure we'd have tons of good movies about evil Soviets.
I don't really see anything so special about the nazis vis-a-vis any of five other modern totalitarian regimes. The imperial Japanese make absolutely fantastic subject matter, too, but after the war propaganda nobody bothered.
The only things the WWII era Japanese have going for them as cool villains (and there are many) have to do with Japanese culture, Bushido being primary amongst these. What the Germans did in real life sounds a lot like CV items from James Bond and comic book villains.
Oh, man, they're really making some serious progress there, aren't they? At this rate, they might finish the movie before 2018 (when the space Nazis are to return to Earth).
For a vague, SPOILER-ish description (the book's cover often gives it away anyhow): A group of teens build a moon rocket, but someone (wonder who?) is there to meet them.
Noooo :P (I am actually reading the book right now ! - they were on their way to the moon when I stopped reading. I don't mind the spoiler that much. Since it's an ebook I don't have the cover anyways)
On the story itself, it's almost too naive to be believed, but I hope it makes for a good movie.
What is it? Nazis make for good cinema!
It makes sense, really. A bunch of guys running around in the 20th century, with mechanized warfare and a world view that would've fit in perfectly well in Genghis Khan's time. It's as if a writer for a video game made them up and they escaped through a time portal into the 1st half of the 20th century.
Why do I even bother with posts like this? Automatic Godwin's!
(Standard Godwin's Disclaimers: Nazis were real and as evil as you can get. The Holocaust actually happened.)