I love me some war documentaries and Netflix has plenty of them including ones that include never before seen footage of colorized battle sequences that I can't believe exist. It is amazing to me that the military sent along film crews to the various battles that took place. Those are all pretty great.
Hitler: A Career takes a very different approach as they really dive into the history of the man all the way back to before he was in power and have some pretty interesting footage of his early speeches that I had never seen before and I presume many other people have also not.
At 2 and half hours long I can say right out of the gate that this documentary is much longer than I would have preferred it be and they go extremely in-depth about the man and his many speeches that he made during his rise to power.
At first I felt as though this production was rather low quality as much of the time the audio is out of sync and at times the audio simply drops out altogether. Then I looked a bit further and found out that there are 2 issues here that i was not aware of: The film was made in 1977 and it was also originally not in English.
The original release of the film was in German and as you may be aware, that country is very careful about the sort of imagery and overall presentations that are permitted to be viewed by the country even to this day. Therefore a lot of the really shocking aspects of Hitler's reign is toned down a great deal. They are very careful to make him look like a master manipulator, and they achieve this end.
The English narration is extremely morose and monotone and the entire documentary feels like a college project rather than something entertaining. Don't get the wrong idea; I'm not suggesting that Hitler is or should be entertaining, but programming normally is meant to be, even when it is about someone terrible like Adolf and I feel as though they kind of failed in that aspect.
I think that a vast majority of people would find this production to be exceptionally boring and too in-depth to actually make it all the way through. They don't even talk about World War 2 at all until more than an hour and a half into it. Therefore it is important to note that this is NOT a war documentary but rather one that shows all the things that happened prior to him getting to that point
Should I watch it?
For those that are hoping this will be an action-packed experience complete with war footage, no, you should not because by design there is very little of that in the entire 2.5 hours of this thing. However, if you are the type of person that enjoys being aware of little-known information about what of the most notorious figures of all time, then this might be very entertaining to you.
