It isn't in the least surprising to find out that there were forty-two attempts to kill Hitler. The only surprise is that there weren't more. As John D. Gresham (a weapons and assault expert) points out, if someone is going to be a professional bad guy all his life, this is expected.
Gresham is only one of the speakers. As expected in this type of documentary, the film is littered with interesting speakers: historians, writers, military experts and so on. All provide interesting viewpoints but what really brings the film to life is the re-creation of the attempts. Even though from the offset you know that all the assassination attempts failed, while watching you tend to keep forgetting that and you say things like "This attempt looks so good. I wonder if it's going to succeed." I think the excitement created by these re-creations is the film's strongest point. You half expect the narrator to suddenly say that one of the attempts succeeded.
The negative is the little time that some of the attempts are given. Before you even know it, you find yourself in attempt 20 and this can make the film feel a bit rushed at times. You wonder if you're missing out on important information. One assumes this happened for a number of reasons. 1) This was originally shown on television so it must have had some time constraints. 2) There are attempts on which there isn't much to say because there isn't much information available or simply because the attempts were not very good or very well planned.
This is a good film. It makes you wonder whether history would have been different if one of those many attempts had succeeded. After watching this you will conclude one thing; that Hitler was a very lucky man. Some of the attempts are truly amazing and extremely well planned by very skilled individuals and it's nothing short of a miracle that Hitler survived all of them.
