`DAS BOOT' SURFACES WITH AN ADDED HOUR OF BRILLIANCE.

Byline: Stephen Whitty Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Had a strange feeling of deja vu lately?

A new print of ``The Godfather'' is playing in some cities. A restored ``Lolita'' is playing in some cities. The revamped and re-amped ``Star Wars'' trilogy is playing everywhere.

And now, the 1981 international hit ``Das Boot'' has sailed back into local ports - with a newly digital soundtrack and an hour of previously unseen material.

Although these additions go far beyond the usual snips of footage added to ``director's cut'' editions, the new scenes may not stand out to everyone. Despite its success, ``Das Boot'' never became, like ``Star Wars,'' a pop-culture cliche; several entirely new sequences on board the sub aren't nearly as startling as one brief extra minute of Jabba the Hutt chatting with Han Solo.

Yet the additions deepen the context and the characters of the movie (originally conceived as a six-hour miniseries for German TV). And, bizarrely, they make what was already a famously fast-paced thriller even more tense.

The movie's set-up is as narrow as the U-boat its characters inhabit. A young war correspondent joins a submarine crew on a mission into the North Atlantic during World War II. Their job is to sink as many British supply ships as they can; his is to come home with some stirring propaganda about German heroics.

In the end, both missions are accomplished - but at costs neither ever imagined.

The submarine sub-genre is a small part of war movies but an important one. From ``Run Silent, Run Deep'' through ``Crimson Tide,'' competent filmmakers have gotten plenty of good thrills out of the enclosed spaces, tense waits and sudden attacks that mark service under the sea.

Amazing miniature work

``Das Boot,'' however, manages to beat them all, for two important reasons.

The first is that most of those movies, simply, didn't have as good a director as Wolfgang Petersen - or as fine a group of technicians as his crew. The miniature work on ``Das Boot'' puts even modern, American stuff to shame; the soundtrack, a densely layered mix of original music, ticking watches, sonar soundings and engine hums, was impressive enough at the time to win several Oscar nominations - a rarity for a foreign film.

Petersen's direction, meanwhile, brilliantly emphasizes the constriction of the surroundings while never itself being constrained by them. From the outside, the U-boat looks immense, breaking the water like a great gray whale; deep inside, it's just a narrow, dirty tunnel, with supplies stored in the head and salamis swinging in the bridge. Yet when the men need to move at once, and fast, they do, and the camera rushes alongside, speeding down the insides of the ship like the torpedoes inside its tubes.

Even while Petersen and cinematographer Jost Vacano capture the limits of life on board, however, Petersen's script subtly pushes at the boundaries of its genre and its characters.

That approach may be the film's greatest strength. The recent ``Stalingrad,'' for example, told the story of that horrible siege from the poor besiegers' point of view; in Japan, there have been a number of best sellers that tirelessly refight the battle in the Pacific.

But ``Das Boot,'' to its credit, refuses to rewrite history in order to appease anyone. It doesn't attempt to placate German hawks by starring a crew of golden Uber-men. Nor does it try to win over American audiences by portraying every sailor as a monocled Nazi - or dedicated Nazi-hater. ``Das Boot'' was always interested in more universal, and complicated, things than that.

`A children's crusade'

There is at least one, true-believing party member aboard - significantly, he's a humorless volunteer from Mexico, an emigrant determined to prove he's more German than anyone. But the rest of the crew are just weary sailors. The officers, all jaded professionals, just want to get home to their wives; the seamen, all childish conscripts, just want to get to the next port.

``A children's crusade,'' the captain calls his young crew. ``Baby faces who should still be at mama's breast.'' But there are such actors behind these faces. Herbert Gronemeyer, who plays the soft young reporter, begins the film looking a bit like the butch Julie Andrews from ``Victor/Victoria''; by the end, he has the shell-shocked look of a veteran. Erwin Leder, the crew's mechanic, watches over his engines like a jealous husband; Klaus Wennemann, the chief engineer, has all the gravitas of a Bavarian bishop.

But it is Jurgen Prochnow who owns this film. He plays the Captain - like most of the characters on board, he has no identity beyond his job description. Yet seeing him, you begin to understand something about the complexities of leadership under fire.

This captain demands obedience from his men, but not blind love. He is fearless in combat, but not ruthless.

When he discovers that the tanker he torpedoed was never met by a rescue ship, for example, he's horrified; when a sailor exults over the Englishmen they've just drowned, he refuses to join in. And when a British destroyer passes overhead - and the Captain gives the order to ``run silent'' and attempt to evade it - we hold our breath and sweat along with him.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Das Boot'' (R; violence, language). In German, with English subtitles.

The stars: Jurgen Prochnow, Herbert Gronemeyer, Klaus Wennemann.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Released by Sony Pictures.

Running time: Three hours, 30 minutes.

Playing: Selected theaters.

Our rating: Four Stars.