I did not understand what the black guy was doing in this movie. just out of place.

This would-be epic suffers from all the flaws that the filmmakers should have feared going into the project: the (largely) German actors cannot quite overcome the transatlantic journey (so to speak), the production values can't justify the magnitude of the scenes, and the script feels like an unsuccessful rekindling of old-fashioned B-movie melodrama, arguably for no other purpose than to fill the three hours needed to make this into a TV mini-series. Subsequently released on home media in various formats, it's hard to believe it would be possible to edit this to greatness. So Robert Wise's 1975 version remains the best filmatization of the famous zeppelin disaster.

The film I saw was only about two hours including adverts so must have been cut from the three hours mentioned in the listing.

I think this movie is a good mix of mainly fictional plot, history, politics, relationships, romance, drama, some suspense and surprise, photography and special effects but one character that didn't work for me was the lead man who was too wooden and passive, yet could perform heroic feats throughout the movie including emerging unscathed and apparently totally unaffected from the most trying of situations!

Throughout the movie there are the usual unlikely circumstances, contrivances and coincidences in which our hero succeeds where common sense says he couldn't possibly do so.

I am by no means a James Bond expert but perhaps this could be seen in some ways as a poor example of a film with a lot of similarities in the format to James Bond films, as the best way to describe the genre perhaps. (A man on a mission, heroic exploits, political intrigue and a relationship with a girl!).