The Hindenburg (1975)

(On Cable TV, May 2022) As much as I like disaster movies, I just couldn’t get into The Hindenburg long enough to care. It’s quite possible that the project was doomed to failure from its inception—let us count the ways: The defining aspect of the Hindenburg tragedy is its final moments, while a defining characteristic of disaster movie is having a steady drip of jolts before, during and after the disaster to truly make a spectacle for viewers. There’s also the Nazi problem, in that the crew of the dirigible and many of its passengers were straight-up Nazis, and I’m not particularly inclined to cheer even for so-called good Nazis. There’s also the film’s very conscious decision to juice up the conspiracy theories surrounding the tragedy as a way to create even more drama. Then there are the execution flaws: shot in bland gray mid-1970s style, The Hindenburg’s sparse sets and spartan atmosphere may be historically accurate, but they suck all of the fun out of a transatlantic trip. Twenty-first century viewers looking at the film with the vantage point of decades’ worth of CGI perfection may not be ideally placed to criticize its visual effects, but it’s still a disconcerting decision to switch back to black-and-white in order to match the real historical footage of the catastrophe with what was re-created for the film. The decision to embrace conspiracy theories also, unfortunately, lessens the tragedy of the deaths – if someone was orchestrating it all, it carries a very different connotation than innocent people dying from a catastrophic accident. Having much of the early plot hinging on a pseudo-mystical premonition is more funny than evocative, and the actors seem stuck in Robert Wise’s automaton-like directing when humans are involved. A lot of work has clearly been done to re-create historical elements (the film got several Academy Awards nominations and wins, including Special Effects) but once again I go back to my first question – was the project ill-conceived from the start? Compounded by its tone-deaf execution, The Hindenburg ends up on the wrong side of the line separating fun from tiresome.