Downfall (film)/YMMV
- Alternative Character Interpretation: This movie was criticized for portraying Hitler as too sympathetic compared to what he is he was in real life.
- Bittersweet Ending: Traudl and Peter taking a bicycle and riding off into the great unknown. Cue the Where Are They Now? Epilogue. Positively sunshine and rainbows...
- Complete Monster: Joseph Goebbels, for simply drafting civilians and hurling them into the meat grinder under the pretence that they will outweigh the Soviets en masse. They won't and he shows absolutely no remorse and sympathy for this.
- Adolf Hitler himself might be a subversion: Downfall was heavily criticized for his portrayal as a sympathetic character, with Pet the Dog moments in the film. Then again, they do nothing to outweigh the fact that he is trying to drag as many people down with him as he can before his hold on power disappears forever. Civilians and children are not excluded from his wrath.
- Frau Goebbels. When you outshine Hitler as a monster, that's quite a feat. Specifically, her most heinous act is forcing their children to take cyanide then doing it herself, rather than live in a world without Nazism.
- What really twists the knife is how the Values Dissonance motivating her affects her attitude towards her Moral Event Horizon. She seems genuinely sad to do it, but sincerely and passionately believes she's doing the right thing. That she sees herself doing her kids a favor by not letting them live in a world where minorities are treated like human beings.
- The lynch mob that goes around killing everyone who looks like they're betraying Germany somehow including Peter's parents.
- Crowning Music of Awesome: Given the subject matter, the score is sporadic and woefully depressing, but Stephan Zacharias' work is absolutely wonderful, setting and reflecting the mood of the film perfectly. Der Krieg Ist Aus and Hoffnung Am Ende Der Welt in particular may be capable of inducing Manly Tears.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: During Traudl's typewriting test in her interview, Hitler reassures her by saying he makes many mistakes when dictating.
- Jerkass Woobie: Hitler in this film.
- Fegelein is also portrayed as this in the film. A Nazi, an opportunist, a deserter… and a young man who just wants to live, unlike his lunatic fellow men determined to die for a crazy ideology.
- Memetic Mutation: The scene where Hitler snaps upon hearing that there are no reinforcements to be mobilized to aid Berlin has been subject to many YouTube videos where different subtitles are given to amusing effect, including, but not limited to Hitler getting banned from Xbox Live, essentially turning Hitler into an all-out Drama Queen.
- The Taiwanese took one step further, making Hitler an Otaku in the process.
- Which itself suffered meta-Parody as Hitler learned about the gag vids, and decided to make war on them.
- Which was in turn subject to meta-meta parody when Hitler found out about the Terrible Fonts the subtitler was using...
- And for the people out there that want to make a Hitler parody without failing, Hitler and friends explain you how to make a Hitler parody.
- The director of the film said that he likes the parodies, and he "couldn't get a better compliment as a director". He also said that they fit the movie's theme: "The point of the film was to kick these terrible people off the throne that made them demons, making them real and their actions into reality. I think it's only fair if now it's taken as part of our history, and used for whatever purposes people like." But while the director may have supported the videos, but the studio went on a DMCA takedown spree, causing people to make Hitler rants about the videos being taken down.
- There are also videos about Fegelein's antics. With Cars 2, Fegelein is now a car.
- Memetic Badass: Fegelein.
- Moral Event Horizon: Just in case you were actually thinking of sympathizing with the poor, broken down old Hitler, he starts boasting about his genocide and treats the surviving Germans with contempt. Herr and Frau Goebbels, of course, display some very unusual attitudes toward family values.
- Nightmare Fuel:
- The most obvious examples are when the viewer first sees children trying to hold back the Soviets and the notorious scene when Hitler snaps.
- Towards the end of the film there's a string of suicides, most of them are off-screen but we have a close-up of one character who shoots himself very suddenly in the face in the middle of a makeshift hospital.
- Also, Ernst-Robert Grawitz uses grenades to kill himself and his family during an otherwise serene dinner. And that's just the tip of the iceberg as far as cruelty to kids in this film goes.
- Nightmare Retardant: The Hitler Parodies have made Hitler's rants considerably less terrifying.
- Tear Jerker: When Frau Goebbels gets her children to consume a spiked drink, so she can slip them some cyanide later, her eldest daughter Helga knows something is amiss and won't drink. Eventually her mother forces her to drink it while she sobs the whole time, leaving the scene positively heartrending.
- Which was worse: the fact Helga realized what her parents were doing and struggled enough to cause deep bruising, or the younger children just trustingly drank the sedative without knowing what it was?
- The German citizens evoke sympathy as well. A father pleads with his son's Hitler Youth unit to save themselves, but they refuse. To add insult to injury, the man's own son calls him a coward.
- And since the father was on the Eastern Front, he at least tries to get them to use a less obviously exposed position to fight. They ignore him and all die having done nothing to stop the Soviets or even hold them up for a while.
- Elder German citizens were executed in the streets because they were unable to or unwilling to fight.
- Watch It for the Meme: It must be something of a Periphery Demographic of the Hitler Bunker clips who thinks, "Wow, a subtitled German film about the last days of World War II - I gotta see this!"
- A parody clip is fairly popular in Greece, due to a satirical TV show.