Best movie of this year hands down!

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Blistering performances.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

WE DIVE AT DAWN is a sedate British wartime thriller that lacks the kind of suspense I find that the best movies in this genre possess. It's a submarine picture in which a crew have their leave cancelled in order that they might pursue a brand-new German battleship, the act of which will have huge propaganda value for the British government.This is quite a low key production made on a smaller budget than usual, as expected for a film made contemporaneously with the war itself. John Mills is his usual reliable self in the main role and the main cast is littered with the usual familiar faces and well-judged character turns. But I found the pace flags and the narrative never really grips as it should, instead feeling like a bit of a slog even though there's nothing really wrong with it. At least it picks up in the last ten minutes...

After watching American Sniper and being so disappointed, I needed a war film fix. I needed to watch a realistic war movie portraying real characters and real challenges.To do so I had to watch a movie made over 70 years ago on a shoe string budget during war time called We Dive At Dawn. Don't get me wrong - I could have watched Generation Kill or Band of Brothers, but I decided to go with a classic British war film. If only today's 'try to be directors' with their enormous budgets would learn from these classics, movies like The Hurt Locker and American Sniper may actually have been good.Next on my viewing list is The Cruel Sea.

Anthony Asquith's wartime action film is surprisingly good, given the constraints under which it was made. The battle sequences are well staged, with stock footage intercut with interior sequences taking place in the submarine. Asquith captures the claustrophobic life of the crew at sea, with each man trying to live as best they can under highly cramped conditions, while remaining loyal to their captain, Lt. Taylor (John Mills). Everyone accepts that death might occur at any time, yet they try their best to extricate themselves from a difficult situation, after trying to torpedo a German battleship, the Brandenburg. WE DIVE AT DAWN is an interesting example of a wartime propaganda film in which every social class is represented, from the upper class officer Lt. Gordon (Jack Watling), to the no-nonsense working class L/S Hobson (Eric Portman), who believes that his wife Alice (Josephine Wilson) has left him for the local fish-and-chip shop owner. Once aboard the submarine, however, social divisions are forgotten: everyone is committed to the cause of destroying the battleship and returning home safely. This message of all people pulling together was one of the most familiar refrains of World War II, both on the home and the battle fronts. In the end the crew succeed in their task, but not without a daring raid on a Danish port in order to purloin some fuel oil, which they achieve in the face of spirited resistance from the Germans. It is chiefly due to Hobson's resourcefulness that the crew succeeds. WE DIVE AT DAWN might seem a little antiquated now, its social attitudes redolent of a bygone age, but it still stands up as an effective piece of wartime propaganda.

This movie is all about reality, submarine warfare in WW2 was not a clean precise science. There were no computers giving exact enemy details, there was no precise instrumentation to 100% control the sub. Not all the crew went to fight with a song in their heart, and a smile on their dial.People with expectations of seeing a "pretty war" in this movie will be grossly disappointed, .............. GOOD, they deserve to be disappointed, they deserve to have reality shoved into their face.War is not clean, exact, fought by people about to break into song. It is endured by scared, cold/burnt, hungry, desperate people willing to do anything to survive."We Dive at Dawn" is a fine example portraying a desperate situation needing desperate actions.