Then I rewatched the final five minutes the morning after (as if I were in disbelief about the conclusion) and bawled like a baby. I'm now 45 and despite seeing it before, I was not prepared for how much this movie would affect me. It had been many years since I watched it with him on VHS, and I must confess that I simply could not appreciate it at the time, which must have been when I was in my 20s. The movie was a favorite of my late father, a WWII vet that ate up anything on film that had to do with the war. So when my mother and I saw that our local This TV channel was airing the director's cut version of Das Boot on Memorial Day, we got excited and set the DVR. I knew I was long overdue, then, for a dive into the retro movie vault to remedy this. As I've gotten older, such works of art have become all the more rarer, given the way Hollywood is going these days, with its banal, never ending parade of remakes chockfull of sterile characters and overblown CGI. But it's the rare film that has all this plus the ability to hit me hard emotionally in some way. Every once in a while a movie will impress me with all of the ingredients of a perfect storm: a stellar storyline, superb acting, impressive sets and special effects, and a memorable soundtrack.