The Movie: Das Boot is considered by many to be the greatest submarine movie of all time, and it was released as a "director's cut" with an hour of additional footage, and a completely remastered and recreated soundtrack in digital surround sound.

And the sound... the sound is the whole movie -- the sound effects and surround field are masterfully created -- it draws you in, adds to the suspense, and leaves you biting your nails and sitting on the edge of your seat throughout the whole thing. Every bubble, every creak and groan is there.

I rather enjoyed this movie, with all of its suspense and action. The reason why I didn't rate it higher is because I really do feel that at nearly three and a half hours, it is too long in this restored form. But the filmmaking was incredible, recreating the claustrophobic feeling of being hunted while in a submarine.

Das Boot is based on the true story of U-96, with its seasoned captain, and his young, inexperienced crew who freshly propagandized, think that they are going off to be heroes, but as the captain already knows from experience, it's not all it's cracked up to be, especially when you're on the losing side of a war. It's absolutely riveting, and I recommend it to anyone who has got the time.

The DVD: The DVD is the definition of a mixed bag. For some reason they went with a dual-sided disc and broke the movie up into two parts, with one half on each side of the disc. If they had gone with a single-sided, dual-layer disc (the technology does not yet exist to make a dual-sided, dual-layer disc), they would have been able to avoid the inconvenience of having to flip the disc in mid-movie. Perhaps someone thought old laserdisc owners would feel better with this format?

But with a movie of this length, it really would have been better for them to have broken it up into two dual-layered discs -- trying to fit this whole movie on this one disc with two 5.1 surround soundtracks meant there wasn't very much room left for the video, and the data rate of the video transfer suffered. The low bitrate of the video manifested itself in an overall lack of clarity and plenty of compression artifacts, including some rather distracting gradient stepping among other problems. Had they broken up this movie into two discs they would have been able to set aside more space on the disc to put together a higher bitrate video stream.

That being said -- the 5.1 surround sound is absolutely stunning -- incredibly detailed with extensive use of surround sound positioning and excellent sound quality. Definitely one of the very best DVD soundtracks I've ever heard. You have a choice between the original German and a dubbed English soundtrack, and of course, you get English subtitles if you want.

Special features run kind of thin, but I don't imagine there was much room left on the disc for them, especially considering how low the bitrate on the video already is, but you do get a short making-of for the director's cut including some overview of the addition of extra footage and the new soundtrack, and you also get an audio commentary track.

So yeah... the movie is great, and so is the soundtrack, but perhaps the video and extras could have been helped by going to a multi-disc format instead of trying to cram all of it on one disc... but it's the only choice you really have if you want to own this movie on DVD.