I decided upon the weekend of December 16th and 17th, 2017.Īt first blush, mid December isn't exactly the best time to tackle such an adventure, but what the hell. It was time to see this place for myself. Gradually the ever-growing myth and lore of The Captain grew in my mind. Others spun tails of such an impossible bushwhack that the trip simply wasn't possible unless you were Sir Edmund.
#THE CAPTAIN 2017 SKIN#
Sounds at night that made his skin crawl with fear. He offered a wealth of information, but also provided a large dose of folklorish hype with the information.He swore that the area was inhabited by Yeti's. I first learned about The Captain from a few seasoned back-packers, one of whom had physically camped at the base of the cliff walls themselves. It's an elusive, mysterious and daunting peak, despite its listing on the NH 100 Highest list.
Adding to the mystique, The Captain can only be viewed from one or two locations within the White Mountain National Forest. The Captain's name arose due to this crag's obvious resemblance to Yosemite's El Capitan.ĭue to the remote location, many lifelong NH residents, F+G, and Search and Rescue members are unfamiliar with the name. 3540 ft appears to be the more commonly listed elevation, but various trip reports cite different elevations. But it also latches on to something even more troubling about the members of this fanatical death cult: when they ran out of people to kill, they started killing each other.The Captain is a 3305-3540 foot, back-country crag, nestled deep inside the thick wilderness valley resting between South Hancock, Mount Carrigain, and the Sawyer River Trail/Road off of NH Rt. In its own very dark way, ‘The Captain’ works as satire on Nazism’s fixation with regulation, paperwork and legal detail as a means of giving itself a veneer of legitimacy. He’s since knocked out Hollywood fare of varying degrees of quality, from ordinary (‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’) to plain awful (‘RIPD’), but there’s something in this dark tale that seems to have given him teeth.įrom time to time, he surfs perilously close to bad taste – the end credits have to be seen to be believed – but for the most part the risk-taking pays off. Also surprisingly, it’s the handiwork of German writer-director Robert Schwentke, who made his last film in his native tongue 15 years ago. This is all based on a true story – you’ll want to forget this in its darker moments – albeit told in a heightened style that contrasts with the stark black-and-white cinematography (imagine Swedish absurdist Roy Andersson at his most nihilistic). He and a small band of henchmen wash up at an internment camp, where he claims to be on a secret mission from the Führer. When a fellow deserter mistakes him for an officer and falls in behind him, it begins to dawn on him that he needs to play the part – a brutal role he soon adopts with alacrity. Herold escapes by the skin of his teeth and stumbles upon an abandoned staff car containing a Luftwaffe captain’s uniform, which he tries on for size.
With the war lost, lives have ceased to matter. The soldier, Willi Herold (‘Mario’s Max Hubacher, brilliantly chilling) is first encountered on the run from fellow Nazi soldiers, in a casually cruel chase that sets the tone for the film. It’s a hypnotic, upsetting and often quite brilliant allegory of the corrosive nature of power in which a simple uniform transforms a deserting private into a mass-murdering monster. This German war drama, set mostly in a POW camp for army deserters in the dying embers of World War Two, mixes a truly hellish vision of defeated Nazis with bitumen-black comedy. You’ve heard of ‘Stalag 17’, now meet Stalag 666.
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