p-rosso Helmut H. Bavaria brought this movie to my attention. I have only one word for the resourcefulness and splendor of this movie: awesome. My under teeth literally fell down. The story is true. A lot of funding was given to the producers for set dressing, so that there were no armpits in the clothes. I was happy to get out of the emotional roller-coaster of Elisabeth and Klaus, only to find that he was gonna be beheaded. Nobody realises that the early pirates have been good for the economy. To all the people that are scorning this production I would like to say: take a look at for instance Crossbones. Now THAT was a bad pirate movie. Or that musical. So I will talk to you later, people.

grafol How can a major German TV station broadcast a mess like this? It's amazing how the main actors avoid every acting talent - Even the well-known Gottfried John is acting very poor - especially in the double murder scene - how amateurish.......! The screen plan is very , very extended - perhaps to fill out 2 parts of the movie. Be careful not to fall asleep while watching! The set is obviously very often a blue screen, f.g. the scenes on the ship with unreal sea in background...! In the German version the sound and the dubbing is very poor - probably reason: different languages of actors - but: other international productions do handle this much more professional. Advice: Do NOT watch - it's a diabolic waste of time!

liderc The first part of this mini TV-serial seemed to me to be pretty ridiculous. Bad photography and lighting resulting in strange pale colors, overuse of computer animated settings making it all look like a computer game, bad acting, cheesy script,... you get the picture. But still the first part made me watch the second part (maybe because nothing better was on that evening), and this time I was really drawn into it! First of all the script was better: Instead of some overused adventure-movie clichés Störtebecker now had a very human motivation for his plans and one could really feel what he felt. The performances also got better this time, and while there were still some silly and staged looking fight scenes and one still had to get used to all the artificial-looking photography and computer animated settings, all in all the second part was much better than the first one. But what really got me was the ending. The way they depicted Störtebecker's tragic death and how he in fact just wanted to serve justice and freedom was very, very intense. (And yes, bot the main actor and his male best friend looked very sexy with the long hair and the beard!)

Hans Schmitzer Störtebeker is truly one of the worst TV mini-series ever made on this planet.The acting is unbearable and the historic background is mostly nonsense: Just two examples: Visby was shown as a village of three houses. Instead, it was a major city at this time, it's best days already passed by. Secondly, Hamburg would have never been the city taking care of pirates in the Baltic Sea. Hamburg had no access to the Baltic Sea, the major town at that time was Lübeck.But worse than all that: The directing! How can a dilettante like this guy be allowed to direct a movie like this? Impossible! There was not a single believable scene it, the fights were ridiculous and I could not suppress laughter at most stern scenes.I can't understand at all how a major television station could be so incompetent.