Uwe Boll: ‘Darfur’ Is Better Than ‘The Hurt Locker’

By  · Published on September 9th, 2010

According to Uwe Boll, his genius is being overlooked. While other directors take on subjects like genocide in Africa and in 1940s Germany to grand approval, Boll has gotten nothing but vitriol spewed at him since the debut of his trailer for Auschwitz. Actually, he’s gotten mostly vitriol spewed on him his entire career.

Fortunately, he’s fighting back with words. A lot of them. A metric ton of words.

In an interview with Viceland, he had some bold statements to make. We’ve weeded through the block text and grabbed the most outrageous claims and put them in handy bullet formatting for your enjoyment (and sanity).

Take a big drink of water and enjoy Mr. Boll’s latest response to haters. You might be surprised.

  1. Ron Howard called Darfur – his film about American journalists witnessing atrocities in the Sudan – a masterpiece.
  2. Darfur is better than The Hurt Locker.
  3. Fifty percent of human beings don’t believe the Holocaust happened.
  4. He made Auschwitz to show the depths of insanity that people are capable of carrying out in a casual way.
  5. The film is 20% violent and 80% daily routine and documentary.

Clearly the statements get calmer as the interview goes on and he has a chance to blow off some steam. The truth is – he’s right. On many levels. On some levels, he’s a delusional hack, but he’s right about people judging his films before they see them.

That comes both from a shoddy track record and the disgust that a man of his bluntness would attempt to take on subject matter that’s incredibly sensitive.

It also comes from the fact that the trailer for Auschwitz is both ultra-violent and shot with the skill of a kindergartner running through a death camp with a camera in his hand.

I have no doubt that a shocking film about the daily life of a concentration camp will be purposefully, successfully unsettling for audiences, and it might help people remember something that should never be forgotten, so I’ll keep an open mind about it. I’ll also look forward to seeing it.

Still, it’s clear that Boll doesn’t quite grasp his own inability to create compelling characters and imagery. He also hasn’t changed his bombastic hobby of writing checks his movies can’t cash.

Hopefully, Auschwitz will be different.

What do you think?

Movie stuff at VanityFair, Thrillist, IndieWire, Film School Rejects, and The Broken Projector Podcast@brokenprojector | Writing short stories at Adventitious.