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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 1/24/2026

Wolfgang Petersen

Few directors have all-around strengths, the ability to see every aspect of a production from pre-production through sound mixing and determine what's best for the story, for the film as a whole. Most noteworthy directors tend to have groups of strengths, certain parts of the production where their attention and skill is most directly applied to their films. Wolfgang Petersen wasn't an all around strong director, but he did have one particular strength: the sequence.

The Sequence Director is actually really interesting because while scripts may end up having issues, the strength of the sequence done really well is its own thrill and joy. John Ford was actually a sequence director according to his own writers, not really understanding narrative form but understanding exactly how to put together a sequence for film. Wolfgang Petersen feels like a similar filmmaker, just without a strong studio system to back him up with a stable of quality writers.

Moving from German television to Hollywood and then getting hired from one job to the next in ever-increasingly large budgeted productions, Petersen proved that he was a man for the time. Taking simple concepts like a president needing to fight terrorists on Air Force One and delivering them with aggressive energy in clearly filmed sustained sequences, Petersen became one of the most powerful and sought-after directors in Hollywood for about a decade. I don't know if that's what he had dreamed of his career being, but he made the most of it while he was there.

German Television

Petersen began his directing career in the mid-60s directing for German television. Mostly television movies, he plugged away at these minimal budgets, finding collaborators along the way like Jörg-Michael Baldenius who was his main cinematographer in the period or, most famously, Jurgen Prochnow, the mainstay in front of the camera for many of these productions like the blackmail thriller Einer von uns beiden (One or the Other Of Us) or the gay drama Die Konsequenz. It was mostly solid work with minimal budgets to good result. The most important of this period may be one of his feature length episodes of the long-running German police procedural Tatort, the episode titled Reifezeugnis which starred Natassja Kinski in her first role.

Television is a hard medium to try and figure out artistic intent from anyone, especially in the 70s when productions were so cheap and quickly filmed, so I watched what I could find, noting my opinions on their qualities, and wondering when the real Petersen would peak out. Was it any of it? The somewhat comic adaptation of The Nixon Recession Caper, Four Against the Bank? The sort of French-like drama that was that episode of Tartort? The gay drama Die Konsequenz? Which one could be called...his?

And then he made the full leap to feature films (though...two of his earlier works were technically released in theaters) with Das Boot, the movie that made his presence known to Hollywood. It was originally released as a feature film, only later re-edited to a longer, multi-episode television edit, but the film's six Academy Award nominations (including for Best Director and Best Screenplay for Petersen as both director and writer) pulled him out of Germany. Well, sort of.

Early Hollywood


Petersen's first post-Das Boot job was The Neverending Story, the adaptation of the German fantasy novel that its own writer, Michael Ende, rejected after Petersen took the story in directions he felt were major deviations from the source material. What I find most notable about the film is the really impressive physical production. The sets are big. The costumes and creature effects are surprisingly detailed and believable. The miniature work is almost convincing. And Petersen made it in Munich. He wasn't ready to leave his fatherland just yet. A solid success at the box office, Petersen really should have been able to make what he wanted after that.

And yet, for reasons I can't quite explain, he took the salvage job of Enemy Mine. My confusion isn't about the quality of the movie but about the decision to take a disaster of a production that had already shot for a few weeks under original director Richard Loncraine, completely revamp the production including throwing out all footage and building huge sets in the same large tank set he had filmed the U-boats in Das Boot, and then spending another $25 million to finish it. The movie would have needed to have been a huge success to make up for those handicaps. It feels like the job for a hatchetman, not an up and coming director having just had his first Hollywood success, but he apparently just liked the script.

Well, the movie bombed, especially considering the sunk costs of its initial push at production which cost about $15 million on its own, and then Petersen didn't release another film for six years.

Biography


I tend to avoid biography when running through a director's work. I want the work to speak for itself, but I'm always interested in gaps in output. So, I tried to find out what Petersen was doing from the release of Enemy Mine in 1985 and the release of Shattered in 1991. I couldn't find much. I saw that he moved permanently to Los Angeles in 1986 and became an American citizen in 1987, but that's it. Surely he was trying to get some projects off the ground in this time, but what they were isn't readily available.

And then Shattered came out, and not only did Petersen direct it. He also wrote it. He also produced it.

I see that it's based on a novel, so surely this was just some flash in the pan novel from the time that quickly gathered interest, right? No, it's based on The Plastic Nightmare by Richard Neely which was published in 1971. Was...Shattered his passion project? Wash Shattered the movie he spent six years trying to gather together resources to make? Was it where he cashed in all of his goodwill in Hollywood? To make a middling adaptation of a ridiculous erotic thriller that lost money at the box office? If Shattered had been a financial success, would the rest of his career been erotic thrillers instead of action thrillers? Was Shattered the kind of movie Petersen wanted to make?

I'll never get the answer to that question because with the financial failure of Shattered, Petersen got the job that would define the direction of the rest of his career.

Action in the 90s


Since the 70s, Hollywood producer Jeff Apple had wanted to make a movie about Secret Service agents, especially with ties to the JFK assassination. He finally cracked the idea when he hired writer Jeff Maguire to write a draft and signed Clint Eastwood to play the central role. In contrast to Shattered, Petersen has neither a writing nor a producing credit on In the Line of Fire, but it was the first box office success Petersen had had in a decade.

If Shattered is the kind of movie Petersen wanted to make, what is In the Line of Fire? I think it really was just a director-for-hire job. A younger director with some obvious chops getting hired by a strong producer (Apple) with one of the major stars of the time (Eastwood) who were going to exert control over the production while Petersen managed the camera. And it was a rather large success, the kind of success where Hollywood looks at the director and says, "You will make more of this kind of movie again."

And that's what he did. From Outbreak to Air Force One to The Perfect Storm, he produced big budget action films with major movie stars (yeah...Dustin Hoffman could be qualified as one for a time, I guess) with lots of special effects and extended action sequences that he could deliver with a professionalism and style that never overwhelmed anything else. And he was hitting financial success after financial success after financial success.

Is there something of Petersen in these films? The military aspects of Outbreak, the confined, extended aspect of Air Force One, and the naval (if predominantly civilian) aspects of The Perfect Storm indicate, to me, an effort on his part (he was producer on all three) to find projects that appealed to him in terms of subject matter. Sure, the scripts could be uneven (Outbreak is like three movies in one that never gel and The Perfect Storm character storytelling is thin with caricature, but Air Force One is awesome), but they indicate to me that Petersen, at his height of power, was using the large scale blockbuster to tell stories that interested him while also finding room for the kind of action spectacle that he could deliver in sustained sequences for the masses and his studio employers.

The 2000s


The 2000s was when Petersen's career faltered. The Perfect Storm was a mild financial success considering its rather large costs, but critically it wasn't exactly loved. Still, critics don't mean much in Hollywood when money's still being made, so Petersen got the assignment to try and continue the sword and sandal epic revival started by Ridley Scott's Gladiator with his pseudo-adaptation of Homer's The Illiad, Troy. It seems like the general opinion on the film has risen decently since the film's release. Using the Wayback Machine, the film started with an IMDB rating in the high 6's and now has a rating of 7.2, a steady climb over more than 20 years. I remember reactions being more muted, especially its bloated nature, some stiff acting, and it being part of an overuse of CGI armies at the time that people were getting tired of.

Well, the film made money, but it was really expensive. Nearly costing $200 million, it only made a shade under $500 million. Combined with marketing costs which were at least $100 million and could have been as much as $200 million and the theatrical share of ticket prices, it's likely that Troy didn't make any profit for Warner Brothers at the box office. Combined with The Perfect Storm likely having a similar fate, Petersen seemed to be on thin ice.

And then the ice broke out from under him with Poseidon. A very expensive re-adaptation of the novel by Paul Gallico, it outright lost money (at least $60 million, and probably more) while meeting critical derision (I have a good time with it), and then there's another large gap.

Finishing Where He Began


As I said earlier, big gaps in a filmography interest me, and this second gap is bigger than the first. From 2006 to 2016, Petersen made nothing. There is a bit more information out there about what he was trying to get off the ground (notably an adaptation of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and a live-action adaptation of the anime Paprika) but nothing came to fruition. At some point, he seems to have given up on making another film in Hollywood and went back to Germany to make another adaptation of The Nixon Recession Caper, this time in more outright comedic fashion. It seems like almost no one outside of Germany has seen this film (I have, I thought it was pretty fun), but it was met with strong success in Germany while meeting no real distribution outside of Germany (European comedies rarely even try international distribution).

His final film completed, he lived for another 6 years and died in his home in Los Angeles in 2022. Did he try to get another project off the ground in his 70s? There's no indication that he did or didn't. I wouldn't have minded seeing one more from him, though.

Legacy


So...who was the real Petersen? I think the closest we'll ever get to the real Petersen, the artist he wanted to be in cinema, is going to be Shattered. Every indication is that it was his baby, the project that he shepherded, wrote himself, and produced for years before he got to set. If that had been a success, we would have gotten more lurid thrillers from him instead of action spectacles.

But it wasn't a success, and In the Line of Fire put him on his proper path: action director. And he was really good at it.
Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

We Bury the Dead

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Das Boot (Rating 4/4) Full Review "I'd be surprised if I felt Petersen came close to matching this again. I've seen enough of what's to come to feel assured that this is going to be his crowning achievement." [Personal Collection]

The Neverending Story (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "And yet, everyone seems to love this film. Ugh, I don't. I've tried, but no. This movie is bad." [Prime]

Enemy Mine (Rating 2/4) Full Review "I just find the actual story to be dull as dishwater. Still, I got some pew-pews at the end." [Library]

Shattered (Rating 2/4) Full Review "So, the film is not terribly engaging, but Petersen makes the experience slick with solid direction, the actors are all committed and doing decent jobs, and I get a kick out of the ending." [Plex]

In the Line of Fire (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's a fun ride, and everyone does their job well. It's a good time at the movies." [Personal Collection]

Air Force One (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's not the top tier of 90s action filmmaking, but it's honestly near the top." [Personal Collection]

Troy (Rating 2/4) Full Review "It's a mixed bag, one I wish I liked more (I'm a sucker for the sword and sandal epic), but this response to Gladiator's success is a good signpost on the road to why the genre died out again." [Personal Collection]

Poseidon (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "Petersen might not have been a visionary, but I think he had an idea of what he was doing." [Library]

Please also check out the rest of my YouTube videos from the last few weeks:

Wolfgang Petersen - The Definitive Ranking
John Carpenter - The Directors Series
John Carpenter - The Definitive Ranking
How to Talk about Movies - A Primer

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.
My next thread will be on 2/14 and it will discuss the directing career of Park Chan-wook.