...I'll watch this film again. A side-splitting comedy with great puns, highly artistic visuals, and a plot that is a marvelous joke in itself.
Much funnier than you'd ever expect from a movie that starts with a multiplied "Heil Hitler" line, this flick features a band of aging Nazi émigrés that somewhere in the future decide to travel back in time to give a hydrogen A-bomb to Hitler. The shambolic plot is held together by some of the best Czech acting of the decade (all of the main protagonists were in fact extremely accomplished stage and movie actors) and a never-ending flow of visual jokes and puns. When the Plan goes horribly, horribly wrong, threatening to choke the future with countless clones of not-so-retired Nazis, the paradoxes are mostly solved by exterminating either the copies or the originals ("Now, I'm going to kill myself"). The moment where the chief Nazi opens his portable A-bomb suitcase in the presence of Hitler, only to discover that the box now contains lingerie, is one of the greatest comedy moments in Czech cinematography. I remember watching the conspirators' faces on slow-mo a dozen times again, and again, and I just couldn't stop laughing.
All the while, this movie has a touch of something greater than mere parody of time travel. As it is one of the last heirs of the inventive Czech New Wave, the movie's crew included many extremely skilled filmmakers, including T. Pistek, the maker of Amadeus' Oscar-awarded costumes.
Overall, if you think you can stand European cinematography, and don't require your average movie to feature Brad Pitt clones, you probably won't be disappointed. This is one of the 20-or-so Czech productions that I'd rank as world quality movies. See the quotes for some of the innumerable cool lines.
Much funnier than you'd ever expect from a movie that starts with a multiplied "Heil Hitler" line, this flick features a band of aging Nazi émigrés that somewhere in the future decide to travel back in time to give a hydrogen A-bomb to Hitler. The shambolic plot is held together by some of the best Czech acting of the decade (all of the main protagonists were in fact extremely accomplished stage and movie actors) and a never-ending flow of visual jokes and puns. When the Plan goes horribly, horribly wrong, threatening to choke the future with countless clones of not-so-retired Nazis, the paradoxes are mostly solved by exterminating either the copies or the originals ("Now, I'm going to kill myself"). The moment where the chief Nazi opens his portable A-bomb suitcase in the presence of Hitler, only to discover that the box now contains lingerie, is one of the greatest comedy moments in Czech cinematography. I remember watching the conspirators' faces on slow-mo a dozen times again, and again, and I just couldn't stop laughing.
All the while, this movie has a touch of something greater than mere parody of time travel. As it is one of the last heirs of the inventive Czech New Wave, the movie's crew included many extremely skilled filmmakers, including T. Pistek, the maker of Amadeus' Oscar-awarded costumes.
Overall, if you think you can stand European cinematography, and don't require your average movie to feature Brad Pitt clones, you probably won't be disappointed. This is one of the 20-or-so Czech productions that I'd rank as world quality movies. See the quotes for some of the innumerable cool lines.