The Academy Awards ceremony continues to devalue itself by giving honors to films, which are mediocre at best, or films that try desperately to force a political agenda down the American people’s throats, while gems such as 2004’s Downfall linger in relative obscurity, and certainly do not receive the recognition they deserve. Director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s study of Hitler’s final days transcends the triviality of being considered a film and instead functions as a window into the past. And for a little more th...n two hours, it feels like we’re actually watching Hitler’s (and a country’s) downfall instead of a movie portraying the events. Part of this authenticity is due to the meticulous recreation of war-torn Berlin in the last ten days of the German dictator’s life. The filmmakers’ painstaking research, which consisted of hours-upon-hours interviewing several of the still-living participants, as well as taking a healthy dose of its story from the memoirs of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary, succeeds in placing us right in the middle of the drama. But the proceedings would be nothing without the criminally overlooked performance of Bruno Ganz, who doesn’t just play Hitler; he becomes him. If Ganz cannot win a Best Actor Academy Award for what he does here, then the whole system no longer contains merit, and the little gold statue means nothing.

Of course, whenever Hitler’s involved in anything, there will always be a lot of controversy that surrounds him. It doesn’t help the film’s global acceptance that Ganz plays Hitler not as a two-dimensional dictator, but as a flesh-and-blood man with his own feelings of pride, uncertainty, and even warmth. But make no mistake. Any critic or viewer that tries to tell you Hitler is shown in a positive light did not even begin to watch the film closely enough. Thus, the only real controversy lay in the fact that Downfall de-poofs stereotypes of what a German under the Reich was… and more importantly, of what Hitler himself was. He is first and foremost a mentally unstable villain. But like all predators, he is not without his share of humanity which does invoke sympathy at times. All the while, the film never tries to justify Hitler. It just tries to understand him, and it is enormously successful in doing so.