ThiefHott
Too much of everything
Moustroll
Good movie but grossly overrated
Fairaher
The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
Tabarnouche
The film approaches the Nazi period from a refreshing angle: the seldom-documented (in film) visions that informed official Nazi aesthetics, given priority by a host of top Nazis who, like their Fuehrer, were failed artists. It offered a number of insights, such as the role played by architectural sketches Hitler had made in his youth and the future propaganda value of gargantuan Greek-influenced architecture (e.g., Reich buildings were designed to decompose along the lines of Roman ruins so as to impress archaeologists centuries later).But the English narration by Sam Gray was so atrocious that it was difficult to separate it from the visual and conceptual qualities of the film itself. Imagine a Beethoven symphony where the strings are played without passion and several beats off from the other sections – no reflection on the composer, but still hard to listen to. So great was the impact of the narration, in fact, that I expected to see ratings averaging 5 or 6 (my vote) on the IMDb site. Gray's uneven, indifferent inflection applied to a script he clearly (to judge by his mispronunciations) had not familiarized himself with gave the film an amateurish quality that it surely did not have in the original Swedish or the German versions. Moreover, the English translation, done by a German, was awkward in places.As tragic an oversight as the choice of the English narrator was, Peter Cohen and the producers ultimately retain responsibility for letting it pass, especially since Cohen had worked in English before. Any educated native English-speaker asked to review it would have cautioned them, after a single listening, not to underestimate how much the narration undermined its effectiveness. Engaging another narrator surely would not have broken the budget.Had I the choice, I'd see this film again with the Swedish or German narrations, subtitled in English.
OneSentence
One of the best documentaries i have ever seen. The disecting of nazism and especially Hitlers various obsession of race, purity, strength, the german people and the ideas and architecture behind it all is nothing but brilliant.So many excellent photos and films and so well "framed" through the music and the narrator that i cant even begin to describe the feeling you will get from seeing this masterpiece!Just take my word for it - if you are historically interrested into nazism and its background you have to make time for this one here.
jacksflicks
It's hard to examine the Nazi movement without seeming sensationalistic and lurid. "Architecture of Doom" achieves the difficult task of illustrating its thesis without sensationalizing it.I have seen and read many histories of the Nazi period, and because of the aesthetic impact implicit in Nazism, the overarching impression I had wasn't the monstrous brutality and inhumanity, but the the uniforms, the rallies, the Wagner. After this film, I was left with a new way of looking and thinking about the Nazis.That the narration is not to some tastes is, to me, a quibble. Actually, I like Sam Gray's narration. The phrasing is novel and very effective. In fact, the "inflectionless" style lends a kind of boldface to the words.This is powerful stuff. There are debatable points, but the general thesis - that Nazism is murder in pursuit of an aesthetic - is mighty compelling.
kev-22
"The Architecture of Doom" is the best surgical picking apart of Hitler's brain I've seen. It thoroughly examines Hitler's aesthetic worldview and how it could have lead to an artistic obsession to recreate the world to fit that vision. Its thoroughness is something Hitler himself might have admired! However, the power of this film is regrettably blunted quite a bit by the poor English narration. Perhaps Bruno Ganz's original narration with subtitles would have been better--though I haven't seen the latter to say for sure. In any case, narration is crucial in films like these (For a great example, listen to Trevor Howard in "Memory of the Camps"), and this lifeless, inflectionless reader really hurts a film that deserves a lot better treatment.
