Happy belated 4th of July to all you War Movie Mondays fans. In celebration of our nation’s 235th anniversary, this week’s pick salutes American submariners of World War II with U-571 (2000) directed by Jonathan Mostow.

The film stars Matthew McConaughey (Lt. Andrew Tyler) Bill Paxton (Capt. Mike Dahlgren), Harvey Keitel (Chief Gunner’s Mate Henry Klough), Jon Bon Jovi (Lt. Peter Emmet), and David Keith (Maj. Matthew Coonan).

U-571 is a fictional account about a U.S. Navy submarine crew which boards, and captures a German U-boat in the Spring of 1942 in order to seize the German’s secret cipher machine code named: Enigma. The device allowed the German high command to transmit radio messages to their U-boat fleet which were destroying the vital convoy lines from America to Britain. The code was unique and made it impossible for the allies to determine the German’s plans in the early stages of the war.

The film is superbly acted and won an Academy Award for Best Sound, but the film was not very well received in both England and Germany. The film was bashed in Britain due to the fact that the British were the first to ever capture an Enigma coding device in the war courtesy of the HMS Bulldog and HMS Aubretia of the 3rd Escort Group in the North Atlantic on May 9th 1941, seven months before the U.S. entered the war. Critics in Germany were none to thrilled of the way U-boat crewmen were portrayed.

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When we first told you about this movie, we gave a bit of info about it including who was going to be in it, Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell, who the director is, the talented Johnathan Mostow, what its all about and when it may be released. This time around, we’ve got the first poster for the upcoming film to share with you.

Brought to us by the folks at Coming Soon, this poster features Bruce Willis flanked by a bunch of what appear to be tubes used to create the surrogates of the title. In fact, they look like other versions of Willis himself, which makes sense. Plus, the poster features a pretty decent tag line that does a good job of encapsulating the story. Willis is the only human in a world filled with artificial people and only he can save mankind from destruction. Sounds like pretty much every other movie featuring Bruce Willis, doesn’t it? But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

As with many posters these days, its not particularly innovative or even that interesting. It just shows the required info which, in this case, is a decent tag line and a giant picture of the movie’s star. Plus, he’s sporting that cool goatee. I guess that’s all you really need to get the message across. Of course, this is just the first poster, so I’m sure we’ll see co-star Radha Mitchell in there at some point too.

Surrogates hits theaters on September 25. Click through for a larger version of the poster.

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