There are no heroes in 'Valkyrie'

I watched the touted film "Valkyrie" with our hero Tom Cruise who is portrayed as spearheading an assassination attempt on Hitler.

The entire movie is a failure, a piece of propaganda aimed at influencing moviegoers who are so young they think World War II is ancient history. The movie begins "in media res," toward the end of the war, when it's safer to be a rebel against Der Führer. The movie creates the flat and uncomplicated Tom Cruise, a Nazi officer, who becomes a boring zealot. The movie fails because Cruise is pure and good. The makers of this movie were lazy and are more interested in making money than portraying any truth. They show nothing about Nazi Cruise when he first joined Hitler's army. I didn't see our hero shoot a Jew in the head, collect money from the Jews as they entered the death camps, extract gold filings from Jewish teeth, shove Jews into cattle cars, toss bread crumbs at Polish refugees who were starving, drop Zyklon B capsules into a gas chamber and kill 2,000 Hungarian gypsies simultaneously, kick a disabled person in the head, or bulldoze hundreds of rotting corpses into mass graves.

I saw no conflict in this movie. No, our hero is clean. Even his thoughts are pristine and he feels no guilt at all. How could he? He's perfect.

In the trailer, Cruise explains this is not a World War II movie. He's right. I frowned every time Cruise's character said "Hitler," the good guy against the bad guy. There should be no good guys in this movie, only soldiers who are trying to make up for what they perceive now as mistakes.

Mark Henkes

Des Plaines