You get actually two movies here. The one is a movie about the Ausschwitz camp (which as many have stated does not look exactly like the original camp -> he didn't have the money to built it) and the other one is interviews with kids about the holocaust and the Hitler in general. The latter is pretty intriguing and would have made for an interesting view if it had stayed alone.

But I had to vote and review both parts and the other one just isn't good enough. Boll tries to be as real as possible (he has stated that this is not Schindlers List, but a real depiction of what went on back then, though Budget restrictions did not really allow him to be faithful to what he wanted to accomplish),but never achieves his goal fully. Due to the budget restrictions the tone is gritty, which helps the documentary style, but does not add acting value, which on the other hand brings the movie down again. Points for trying ... or maybe not ... up to you to decide ...

AUSCHWITZ is something atypical for a Uwe Boll movie. The German director notorious for making B-movies like BLOODRAYNE and IN THE NAME OF THE KING decided to try his hand at making a 'worthy' film a la SCHINDLER'S LIST. The end result is AUSCHWITZ, a look at what went on inside the infamous concentration camp.

Sadly, this film turns out to be just as poor - if not more so - than the rest of Boll's output. It's a short film with a documentary feel that aims to put across to the viewer what it feels like to be gassed in a chamber. It's suitably explicit and depressing, but Boll's direction is so poor and the acting so bad that it lacks the real power needed to convey the message properly. It doesn't help that with the running time coming up so short, Boll pads things out by having random German teenagers chatting about the Holocaust, which is indeed very random.

First of all, I have to say in Uwe Boll's favor that I am completely against smear campaigns that discredit the entire body of work from a filmmaker only because he made 2 or 3 really bad movies. Unfortunately, "Auschwitz" comes close to that description too. The film starts with Boll saying something about his film and also ends with it. I personally find this a very annoying watch and it has a narcissistic take in my opinion. This is just personal perception though, but I think this stuff should be on DVDs as commentary or something like that. What is not subjective is the fact that Boll delivers pretty much nothing of substance in his monologues and his English is also really bad. He should not have done it I think. Then there are two sequences of classroom action when we hear Boll ask questions about Auschwitz, the Holocaust and Nazis to German students. It becomes obvious that most of them are really not that educated on the subject. Some are, but most are not.

This is the premise that Boll uses as the motivation to make this film. The long middle sequence of the movie depicts the re-enacted action from the concentration camp in Auschwitz. It is very graphic, but that should not come as a surprise with Boll behind the film. We see people die in gas chambers. We see a young boy being shot in the head by a Nazi officer. Sadly, we do not really learn anything in this middle sequence. I am fairly certain there was nothing in there you would not know by now and I refuse to believe that students were really that limited in terms of knowledge about concentration camps. In my opinion, the interviews with the student were entirely or almost entirely scripted.

All in all, it's not a complete failure of a film and I agree that it is certainly difficult to bring something new to the subject with the hundreds of films and documentaries that already exist about it, but it was still a very unrewarding watch. This is a bit of a shame as the cast was not entirely bad. I believe Arved Birnbaum for example is a talented actor. But he has little to work with here with Boll's script. So yeah, the best thing is probably that this film does not even run for 70 minutes, so it does not drag at least for the most part. The worst is probably the parts during which Boll elaborates in a cringeworthy manner on why he made this film very early. As a whole, not recommended.