'Nuremberg' Is the Moderate Position
'Nuremberg's sleeper hit status is happening for a reason. It's a film that simply should not be missed by anyone living through 2026.
Though we accept today the International Criminal Court and the Hague as a given, less than a century ago, the concept was fairly radical. Their creation drives the would-be awards contender, Nuremberg, which, unfortunately, has been marketed as an “American psychological thriller historical drama.” In truth, the film is a perceptive study of a group of judicial and military men who put their careers on the line to invent and act out an evolving court scenario whose ethical soundness would seem so correct, so rooted in agreed-upon just natural human behavior, that its legality would be taken as self-evident before a vast public.
The problem of what to do about Holocaust criminals was something of a crisis point in the aftermath of World War II. In the late 1940s, there was no international set of laws accepted by a large majority of individual nations. Framed as an emblematic story of a widely experienced 20th-century world war of interest to people across the globe, the film focuses most of its riveting screen time on two individuals who did not participate in deciding the terms of the judicial trial.
The core compelling defendant, Hermann Goering (captured brilliantly by Russell Crowe), had concocted and supplied the means by which millions of guiltless people were abducted by state-sanctioned military, shipped to where they could be easily exterminated, treated barbarically, or experimented on like animals. He’s seen primarily through the eyes of Douglas M. Kelley (Rami Malek), a respected physician of human behavior, hired to examine Goring to see if he was fit to stand trial.
