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U-571 is a 2000 film directed by Jonathan Mostow, and starring Matthew McConaughey, Bill Paxton, Harvey Keitel, Thomas Kretschmann, Jon Bon Jovi, Jack Noseworthy, Will Estes, and Tom Guiry. In the movie, a World War II German submarine is boarded in 1942 by disguised United States Navy submariners, seeking to capture her Enigma cipher machine.

The film's plot, though a work of fiction, is partly based on real events. It attracted criticism for two reasons: first, it was British personnel from HMS Bulldog who first captured a naval Enigma machine, from U-110 in the North Atlantic May 1941, before the United States entered the war. Second, German U-boat crews were portrayed in a negative light.

The real U-571 was never involved in any such events, was not captured, and was in fact sunk in January 1944, off Ireland, by a Short Sunderland flying boat from No. 461 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force.

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Americans didn't capture the Enigma decoder. Britain did...but it's an American movie, so, you know what happens. It's more appealing to an American audience this way.

Hollywood never lets the facts get in the way of a good story. It's always best to remember that these are dramatisations, not documentaries (even though no documentary is 100% unbiased), and it's best to avoid taking what you've seen as a historical fact, because more often than not it isn't. Hollywood routinely changes works of fiction to make it 'better' for the screen (for example, the ending of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale"), and it does the same thing with historical and/or factual material too.

Sadly, there are still some people walking this earth who believe that Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet's characters in 'Titanic' were real people, when they are in fact both nothing more than literary inventions.