It’s taken me an unusually long time to see Nuremberg, but having finally managed this feat it’d be a dereliction of duty if the film slipped by without a review. Writer-director, James Vanderbilt, has created the kind of solid, old-fashioned movie we rarely see any more. The dialogue is excellent, the characters convincing, and the moral of the story too big to miss. It deals with a heavily loaded moment in history in a way that doesn’t simply devolve into a fable of good versus evil.
This is quite an achievement because for the past 80 years, the Nazis have been Hollywood’s most reliable moral miscreants. What’s more surprising is that Nazism today is undergoing a resurgence, which seems to denote a sickness in our society. At the very least it reveals an alarming lack of historical consciousness in those who act as if the war itself was only a movie.
Vanderbilt noticed this when he found that for his own daughter the events of World War Two had no sense of reality. As the veterans of the conflict and the survivors of the concentration camps disappear, that human connection with history is lost. The most terrible events begin to seem like fiction.