Das Boot: this tense submarine thriller is 'TV for dads' that the rest of us can enjoy

Growing up I always assumed the movie Das Boot was an elaborate joke played on me by my father. There cannot be a five-hour film, sorry. Subtitled entirely in German. Which you had to record in two shifts, as two half-films, from two late-night showings on BBC Two. And erase my tape of Jurassic Park to do it. None of this is real.

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

I assumed that, when I marched into the front room during the five dedicated hours put aside for watching Das Boot, I would discover what strange adult ritual my dad was really performing – sniffing glue? Eating olives? Saying the word “fuck” out loud? – but, no. He really was sitting there, on his sofa, arms folded and legs outstretched, utterly engrossed in 300 minutes of German lads going slowly mad in a submarine. One day, I figured, I would grow up, and have a beard, and watch Das Boot, and then I would be a dad, transformed from a child for ever.

Well, it’s 2020, and I wouldn’t call it a beard exactly but there’s something up there, and Sky Atlantic is about to air season two of its big-budget adaptation of Das Boot (Thursday, 10.05pm). Do I understand now why Dad recorded over four episodes of The Simpsons to watch the predecessor? Sort of, but not exactly. I mean: kind of. But also no.

Obviously, an atmospheric, no-fun drama set in the simmering cauldron of a second world war submarine – where danger surrounds you, both from the murky waters above and from the complicated hierarchy of men, young and old and grizzled and green, who all have differing levels of dedication to the wartime cause – isn’t for everyone. But with that smooth patina of Big Budget TV over the top of it, Das Boot becomes compelling to an audience wider than – and I’m using my own father as an example – “men who go to the library twice a week solely to take out non-fiction war books about U-boats and chain-smoke roll-ups while reading them in utter silence”.

How Das Boot achieves this is by taking a lot of the water out but keeping the claustrophobia in. Season two opens with a thrilling series of above-ground plot points, all poised to interlace: a French resistance operative working as a double agent in an SS-operated police department; a grieving soldier desperate to find his abandoned daughter; a too-trusting senator’s son and the U-boat engineer he scooped up out of the sea, schmoozing through the nightclubs of Harlem.

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

It feels like, in the last 50 years of film and TV, every atom of the second world war has been exhausted, but Das Boot goes somewhere new with it and paints a special artistic tedium – two captains are slightly rude to each other at a dinner, French inspectors passive-aggressively praise their German superior for his improving French. It’s never really clear who the goodie and who the baddie is at any one time, and that makes it more gripping than a period drama about “Germans not really loving war, actually” deserves to be.

Ask yourself: does the idea of a bone-dry drama where men with unruly beards slowly unravel from the guilt of their acts of war appeal? If yes, may I suggest Das Boot. If not: I think I’ve still got a half-erased Jurassic Park VHS I could lend you.