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“Hitler: The rise of evil” is a title that basically says it all. It’s about the early years of a failed artist who joins the military and becomes an antisemite. After the war is over he starts to give speeches about his political views and that will eventual result in him becoming the nation’s leader and the Holocaust. “The rise of evil” also covers the view you’ll be getting from Hitler. A man, or more a monster in shape of a man, with very few human emotions. Always angry, always furious. Hitler never smiles and his only emotional attachment to females is an awckward crush on his niece who he dominates and Eva Braun, who’s also abused. To worsen things more up, he even beats his dog.
This is the problem with “Hitler: The rise of evil”; Hitler is portrayed as a caricature. A relentless monster stripped off all human emotions except for anger and hate. Love is there but only in an abusive amd dominating form. Now the movie covers how his rise became possible due to the help of the SA, financial backers, politics, marketing, the failing economy and of course his famous talent for delivering enigmatic speeches, but by making Hitler appear as a yelling madman in every scene it’s hard to accept the fact that millions of Germans voted on his persona and that he had a lot of help. I can understand the controversy about portraying Hitler as a ’normal‘ man. The humanized performance given by Bruno Ganz in Der Untergang was subject to a great deal of controversy. We want to see Hitler as a monster because that detaches him of ourselfs. We want to believe the holocaust was not the work of a man, but that just isn’t true. The Hitler in the movie is a Hitler nobody could stand for being in a room together with longer than 5 minutes. He’s is a non-stop-grouch. Worse even, a yelling grouch. People like that die alone and/or turn into guys like the unabomber, they don’t wind an entire nation around their finger and are then possible to systematically destroy people because of their religion.
Now there is another annoying thing about this film. It’s in English. That makes it lose authenticity and even add to the caricature. There is a scene where a young newspaper boy yells “War” while the newspaper he’s holding up says “Krieg”. Signature lines like Sieg Heil and titles like Fuhrer have not been translated while other have. It’s inconsistent and that’s a bit of a letdown, although I do understand that translating an iconic term like Sieg Heil would make people cringe but it does show us that the movie could’ve been better if it was in German.
The movie is interesting for the fact that it shows us how one man became the most powerful man in Germany with extensive detail. It’s really interesting to see how everything came into place and what it took behind the scenes for him to get there and how he met people like Eva Braun and Joseph Goebbels. But they should’ve given us a true face of Hitler. Not a man who is on the verge of a nervous breakdown in basically every scene.
Hitler: The rise of evil is a movie that gives us indepth look of how one man rises from the gutter to the most powerful man in all of Europe. In other words: Hitler lived the American Dream. Sort of.
