Yesterday, I saw the movie Nuremberg with a friend. It was ... OK, but I can't help think that there was material for a much better movie. There are several things that I noticed at a nit-picking level, such as the use of language that seems to belong to the year 2025 than to 1946, but let's concentrate on the larger issues.
- Let's get this out of the way first: the movie was shaped to draw parallels between Göring and Trump. There were too many such winks and nods to the audience, and I heard the Canadian audience reacting as programmed by the screenwriters. A story like this should be about history and timeless truths, not about contemporary politics. It should be better than Saturday Night Live.
- I think the biggest failure of the film is the lack of emotional stakes. For the most part, the sentences were foregone conclusions -- especially for the likes of Göring himself. Everyone knew that. This was a ritual, both the trial and the execution; if the only point were to produce dead Nazis, Göring's cyanide pill did the job just as well as a noose would have.
The purpose of the ritual was largely to emphasize that the crimes of Nazi Germany were different from even typical war crimes; that there is an objective moral order that nations might ignore but which they cannot destroy. The movie makes a serious mistake in not merely downplaying, but largely denying this. None of the characters in the movie see good and evil as moral issues, but only as practical issues to prevent GERMANY from starting a Third World War. That, however, was prevented through much more practical means than the Nuremberg Trials.
If the insight that the capacity for almost unlimited evil lies within all of us was intended to produce an emotional crisis, it should have been shown having that impact on one of the characters -- probably Kelly, since he seems to be the protagonist. THIS NEVER HAPPENS. The most he or anyone else does is worry that "other people" (in every nation, but still "other") are vulnerable to the appeal of evil. None of them ever worry that they might themselves become evil. - Schindler's List had the emotional impact it did because the Jewish victims of Nazism were shown as people, not merely as victims. The closest the movie comes to doing this is in the family story of Sgt. Triest, but he is a minor character, the story is told rather than shown, it is very brief, and it only comes near the end of the movie. Triest should have been the central character instead of Kelly.
- A better soundtrack could have helped shape the emotional pull of the movie. Even Star Wars [A New Hope] is the great movie it is largely due to t he soundtrack.
- The "gotcha" moment in the trial is actually a failure. Göring was not to be hanged for his feelings or for hypothetical crimes; he was sentenced to death for actual crimes in the real world. Asking if he would still have supported Hitler "if" he had known about the extermination of the Jews might make him less charming, but it would have little or no impact on the trieal.
