Or it could mean that said movie features a once-huge star who may not have the drawing power with audiences he once had, and who may feel he needs a degree of protection from possible criticism. Tom Cruise, who dominates “Valkyrie” as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the aristocrat turned officer who came close to assassinating Hitler in 1944 by sneaking a bomb into his private conference room, has become He Who Cannot Be Named unless you’re going to say something nice. He’s also the weakest link in “Valkyrie,” which is neither a masterpiece nor an embarrassment, but a workmanlike picture that sits, inoffensively, in the middling space between.

The titles at the end of “Valkyrie” tell us there were 15 known attempts on Hitler’s life, although the one dramatized here, masterminded by operatives in the German resistance, is the best-known, partly because it came so close to succeeding and partly because it resulted in the execution of some 200 conspirators. Out of necessity, Singer and his writers, Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander, have condensed the number of players in the story: On the good guys’ side are, among others, Bill Nighy’s Gen. Friedrich Olbricht, Kenneth Branagh’s Maj. Gen. Henning von Tresckow, Terence Stamp’s Gen. Ludwig Beck and, of course, Cruise’s Stauffenberg. On the side of those remaining to be convinced (with varying degrees of success) are Tom Wilkinson’s Gen. Friedrich Fromm and Eddie Izzard’s Gen. Erich Fellgiebel.

That’s a lot of uniforms to keep straight, and although Singer does an admirable job of making sure that most of the main characters emerge distinctly, this isn’t an actors’ movie. Singer is better with the mechanics of the story, which are both complicated and fascinating: The operatives knew that it wouldn’t be enough just to assassinate Hitler, or Hitler and SS leader Heinrich Himmler. They would need to take control of the government as well, and their chief tool for doing so would be Operation Valkyrie, a contingency plan that, as the movie explains it, had been conceived by the German military as a way to contain civil unrest in the event of Hitler’s death, or if his power were somehow compromised. Stauffenberg (whose position allowed him close contact with Hitler) and his co-conspirators would first assassinate Hitler with concealed explosives and then, somehow, get Friedrich Fromm to initiate Operation Valkyrie. (He was the only officer with the authority to do so.) They could then move forward in disarming the SS and arresting other Nazi leaders.

Obviously, the plan didn’t work — “Valkyrie” also briefly dramatizes an earlier plot, in which a Cointreau bottle cleverly rigged with explosives fails to go kaboom — and in this detailed procedural, Singer outlines all the hows and whys of its failure: There’s a tense briefcase switcheroo, and some furtive fumbling with a small detonator thingie. This is the stuff of which suspenseful dramas are made. But “Valkyrie” drags a bit ponderously for the first two-thirds, as Singer and his screenwriters dutifully set up the mechanics of the murder and subsequent takeover plot. It’s all necessary information, presented authoritatively. But does it have to be so drab and lifeless? The movie’s color scheme doesn’t help much: Shot by Newton Thomas Sigel in a palette of institutional grays and greens — predictable Nazi colors — “Valkyrie” has the look of a movie that’s only following orders.

“Valkyrie” can’t decide if it wants to be a sturdily constructed modern-style thriller (McQuarrie also wrote Singer’s first big hit, “The Usual Suspects”) or an old-timey suspense entertainment packed with movie conventions. Singer throws in a little from Column A and a little from Column B, and not all of it works. Just before Stauffenberg sets out to finalize the assassination plot, he bids his wife, Nina, played by Carice van Houten (the terrific actress from Paul Verhoeven‘s “Black Book,” in a smallish role), goodbye. The moment turns mawkish when he reminds her that if he’s caught, the authorities will come after her and the couple’s children, too. The camera drifts down from Nina’s face to show her hand clutching her dressing-gown-clad stomach, the semaphore used in the old days to signal that a character is “with child.” Conventions like that aren’t necessarily clichés — it all depends on how they’re executed — but Singer doesn’t always have good control over these melodramatic flourishes. Too often they jangle the tone of “Valkyrie.” The story — we’re talking about a bunch of guys trying to kill Hitler, for God’s sake — has enough drama on its own; who needs the extra hokum?

But the picture starts moving along more briskly in the last third, as Singer and his writers get into the groove of balancing all the little ways in which the scheme goes wrong — and right. And maybe “Valkyrie” gets more interesting as it steams toward the climax because by that point, we’re distracted from fixating on the almost uniformly lousy performances of the actors. A colleague of mine said that he thought “Valkyrie” would be memorable only because every single actor in it — with one exception — gives the worst performance of his career. I’m not sure he’s completely right — I think I’ve seen Tom Cruise much worse — but he’s got a point. It’s strange to see people like Nighy, in particular, fluttering around the picture like a nervous bird. I’m sure there were nervous German generals in real life, but Nighy just comes off as dithery and high-strung. Wilkinson is sometimes a terrific performer (“In the Bedroom”) and sometimes a massive scenery chewer (“Michael Clayton”); here, he settles into a comfortable groove of Naziformity, though he’s not particularly engaging to watch. But poor Izzard — a genius as a comic and often an extremely appealing actor too — has it the worst. I don’t think it’s in Izzard’s blood to be able to play an uptight German army officer with a straight face. Everything he does — from his mannerisms to his clipped line readings — comes off like an impersonation of some famous person you just can’t place.

It’s a shame that most of the actors in “Valkyrie” can’t find their footing, considering that one of the most compelling facets of this story is the way it distinguishes between men who knew enough to think for themselves and those who just went around following orders. The story at the heart of “Valkyrie” recognizes that there were members of the German military who saw the damage Hitler was doing to their own country, not to mention the rest of Europe, and who were determined to take action. One actor in particular, Stamp, brings that idea home: His final scene is extraordinary, a moment of uncomplicated grace that temporarily stops the movie cold.

Cruise stops the movie too, but in a different way. Stauffenberg makes for a dramatic-looking character, all right: In 1943, while he was stationed in Africa, he was injured by British bombs and lost his right hand, several fingers on his left hand and his left eye. And like many other officers in the German army, he came from a refined, aristocratic background: He was a man of ideas and probably had superb posture to boot.

Cruise does OK in the posture department: He’s had years of experience marching around self-importantly in movies, so playing a German officer isn’t such a stretch. And he does have one good moment, as Stauffenberg stares himself down in the mirror during a morning shave: He confronts his reflection, and that empty, shriveled eye socket, with a degree of determination that seems to have been summoned from the core of his very being. Unfortunately, that doesn’t much help his diction. At one point, Stauffenberg raises objections to certain parts of the assassination scheme: “What are you going to do?” he asks. “How are you going to deal with Goebbels, the SS?” Except the words that come tumbling out of his mouth are, “What’re you gonna do? How’re you gonna deal with Goebbels, the SS?”

Whassup with that? And sue me: Every time I looked at Cruise’s solemn, self-serious visage, I kept seeing a chipmunk with an eye patch. I do have some sympathy for Cruise. After a career of coasting on his regular-guy boyishness, he’s now well into middle age, and while actors have it easier than actresses as far as that goes, in Hollywood, advancing age is no one’s friend — especially if you first made a name for yourself as a teenager dancing around in your underwear.

Then again, wouldn’t now be a good time for Cruise to start figuring out how a German army officer — an aristocrat — might actually speak, instead of riffing on stuff he remembers from “Top Gun”? In “Valkyrie,” Singer decided to let all the actors use their natural accents, instead of speaking with a German one. It’s a choice with pluses and minuses, but at least it allows an actor to shape a performance in the way he’s most comfortable with. But maybe Cruise is just too comfortable in the role of Tom Cruise. In his own personal land of make-believe, you can become someone else just by donning an eye patch. But that doesn’t mean you had much depth perception to begin with.

But you know what makes all the little children feel better about how dark and scary the world is? Fairy tales. So let’s start with a fairy tale about a little prince named Tom Cruise.

Cruisin’
Once upon a time, there was a sad little prince named Tom Cruise who wanted to share his love with the world, but the world wasn’t in the mood. As the little prince trampled joyfully on Oprah’s butter-yellow sofa, all the world’s peoples sighed and picked lint off their corduroys. Even as they listened to the squeals of the unruly fraudience of middle-aged “Top Gun” groupies who’d been fantasizing about Tom to the strains of “Take My Breath Away” for 20-odd years straight, they remained indifferent. They had fallen out of love with Tom somewhere around the 50th time they heard a roomful of frat boys sing “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” They certainly weren’t having any of this latest flash of bleached teeth and overflowing emotion for a princess bride whose career had been up “Dawson’s Creek” without a paddle for years.

So little prince Tom gave the world the cold shoulder. Prince Tom and princess Kate and their anatomically correct robot-baby, Suri, would lock themselves away in their 400-acre kingdom in Telluride, sipping red rum to get through those long wintry months. Sure, they’d allow legendary photographers to enter the snowy compound and photograph them as they squeezed each other and squinted into the middle distance like models at a Sears catalog shoot, but otherwise they’d remain far from our nasty, clawing, thetan-infested, psychotropic-drug-popping clutches.

Until last week, when little prince Cruise decided to allow Oprah (also royalty, after all) into his magnificent castle for a face-to-face interview. Needless to say, there would be no jumping and waving and fist pumping this time around. No, sir. Donning his “No, I’m serious!” face, Tom sat down with Oprah for a heart-to-heart … or maybe we should call it a heart-to-press release.

Oprah: People think you’re insane, judgmental, controlling and possibly gay. They wonder why you lost your doughnuts on my show. They wonder why you condescended to that nice man Matt Lauer and insulted poor depressed Brooke Shields. They wonder if Suri is your baby or just a wondrously lifelike assemblage of pricey robotics …

Tom: I’m not going to comment on what … The press really doesn’t interest me, unless they’ve got all their credentials in order and they’re contractually obligated to photograph me from my good side.

Oprah: Come on, Tom, don’t you just want to die sometimes?

Tom: [Frowning] I’m incredibly happy, so happy I can’t even put it into words. I feel so very privileged and blessed, truly blessed, to live this life. I feel pretty and witty and … I’m sorry, our time is up. The chopper is waiting outside for you.

And so Oprah flew off, and the little prince lived happily ever after in his imaginary mountain kingdom! See, children? Even when entire villages are leveled and pretty horsies are killed, there’s still hope left in the world. God isn’t dead, boys and girls, he just likes Tom Cruise better than you.

If you’re craving even more “T.C.,” there’s a nice summary of his interview in the Washington Post, but here in ILTW-land, we’ve got bigger fish to grab straight from an icy river, chop into little pieces, stuff into jars and subsist on for the next three months.

Unbaked Alaska
Did that make you hungry? If so, it may be time for you to tune in for “The Alaska Experiment” (10 p.m. EDT Tuesdays on Discovery), which starts with the basic premise of “Survivor” — ordinary people, struggling to survive without caffeine, booze or Internet access — and throws in subzero temperatures, hungry bears, rifles so powerful that they bruise your face, rocky cliffs, rusty handsaws, freelance moose-hunting experts, canvas tents and circling wolves. Oh, and there’s no million-dollar prize, either. Welcome to the Discovery Channel, where you suffer for free!

The aptly named “volunteers” of “The Alaska Experiment” consist of four teams. There’s a married couple (Greg and Bernice), three friends (Tim, Jasmine and Allan), a father and two daughters (Dennis, Jennifer and Carolyn), and a dating couple (Elizabeth and Jeff). The quality of living quarters and the surrounding landscape vary wildly for each team. While the family of three lives in an “old fish shack” near a beach, the dating couple beds down in a canvas tent, even though they see brown bears roving around the area regularly. The teams also spend their time differently: The three friends obsessively chop wood for the winter, while the family and the dating couple spend several days catching salmon with their hands, cleaning them, chopping them into chunks and then sealing them in cans so they’ll have a source of protein to eat as the winter approaches and there’s not much hunting or fishing in the area.

The teams also seem to have very different aptitudes for surviving in the Alaskan wilderness for three months. The father and daughters manage to can a bunch of salmon for the winter, while dating couple Elizabeth and Jeff don’t seal their jars correctly and lose half of their salmon as a result. In fact, Elizabeth and Jeff seem to struggle at every turn: Water floods their camp; menacing bears linger in the distance; crab traps remain empty (while a voice-over scoffs that they’d have to eat many a crab indeed to ingest even a little protein); driftwood refuses to budge as the waves lap at their feet. Meanwhile, hunger and fatigue make them both snippy — although we’re not treated to the sorts of knock-down, drag-out bickering matches you’d find on “The Amazing Race.” (Dear Discovery Channel: Please try to emulate CBS’s policy of recruiting wildly dysfunctional humans for your reality shows so we’ll get all the hotheaded exchanges and unwarranted nastiness that we so richly deserve.)

But “The Alaska Experiment” makes up for the lack of personality disorders on display with other fun stuff, like freezing rain and flooded outhouses and gigantic bears that stare at you long and hard instead of running off into the brush when you yell at them. Sometimes the voice-over is a little too cheesy to take — “Back in sunny California, Greg is used to pouring concrete, not fending off wolves!” — but this show is just too rich to be tripped up by a little clunky prose. Plus, when Greg almost stumbles down a rocky cliff while trying to shoot a goat in the foggy distance, all we can think is, “Jesus, this guy is used to pouring concrete back in sunny California, not stumbling down rocky cliffs while trying to shoot a goat in the foggy distance!”

In last week’s episode, Tim, Jasmine and Allan get so desperate for some source of protein before winter sets in that they go out hunting for squirrels and rabbits. Even though they do tag a few sweet little woodland creatures, Jasmine, who describes herself as a pacifist, is less than thrilled about the situation: “I have to say, it wasn’t the most pleasant experience to have to cut off their paws.”

Then the next day, the three of them are on a walk when they see big birds circling nearby. Despite the risk of running into predators, they draw closer and discover the bloody carcass of a bison. “Eww!” Jasmine gasps, and then she practically elbows the feasting eagles and birds out of the way as she reaches for her hunting knife. “There’s still a lot of meat left on it!” she murmurs, carving some red, gnarled-looking muscle from — yes, that’s right! — the dirty, bloody heap of skin and bones and guts they just stumbled on.

In other words, unlike the contestants of “Survivor” or “The Amazing Race,” the volunteers of “The Alaska Experiment” don’t demean themselves; Mother Nature demeans them. Mother Nature is a vengeful whore, too, which explains why we’re watching a pacifist hacking on a bison carcass. But seriously, does TV get any better than this?

Let me guess: Next week, lost in the snowy woods, Jasmine tries desperately to build a fire, but her matches keep dropping into the snow and going out. “I have to say, it wasn’t the most pleasant experience freezing to death.”

Going back to Cally
And while we’re slipping into the darkness, let’s not forget “Battlestar Galactica” (10 p.m. Fridays on Sci Fi), which has swerved into seriously uneasy territory lately, with each scene more full of desperation and despair than a malfunctioning jumpy castle filled with sugar-addled toddlers. Starbuck pulls a gun on Roslin, Roslin obsesses over her impending death, Adama mumbles around in a funk, and Chief Tyrol stays out late drinking with the increasingly demonic fellow skin-job Tory, telling her, “I look in the mirror nowadays, I don’t even know what I am.”

Christ, Chief, pull yourself together! But in case you missed this episode, which plays like an after-school special on the dangers of fraternizing with robots, Chief’s quiet moment of heavy drinking is interrupted when a sleepless, haunted-looking Cally enters the bar with her fat baby on her hip, Sean Preston-style. The baby starts screaming and crying and basically doesn’t stop for the entire episode, which, taken alone, would be enough to make most of us leap out of the nearest airlock and float off into outer space. (Foreshadowing intended.)

But it gets worse! You’ll recall that Cally is absolutely brimming over with hatred for those damnable toasters. Remember that awesome scene on Caprica where she shouted at Chief, “Talk to me, you motherfracker!” and then they both laughed, and you had to wonder if they liked each other a little bit? Yes, those two had the enduring love of two college kids who once got drunk and macked at a kegger, and then spent the rest of their lives together, trying to figure out why. Chief was always far more smitten with Boomer. (And hey, Chief and Boomer were both Cylons, too! They had sooo much in common.)

Anyway, Cally follows Chief and Tigh and Tory one night, and she hears them talking about the fact that they’re Cylons. She’s so distressed over the whole thing that she scoops up her crying baby and looks about ready to float out into space and take the kid with her. And honestly, there’s something vaguely distasteful about the whole thing, like the writers are trying to teach us a lesson about racism and the rigidity of the American identity and how the pressures on working-class people with families are sometimes just too much to bear.

But all we’re thinking at home is, “If Sean Preston doesn’t make it out of this alive, I am going to be pissed!” Luckily, though, Tory is on the scene to soothe Cally into handing over her son, and once the baby is safe in Tory’s arms, Tory casually backhands Cally, sending her flying several feet. Then Tory stares Cally down with her cold Cylon eyes and presses a button that opens a hatch and sends Cally tumbling off into space. We should be horrified, but now that the baby has been saved, seeing Tory go all Legion of Doom on Cally’s weak Wonder Twins ass is mildly thrilling. Muhahaha!

But Chief Tyrol and his kid don’t have a lot in common with K-Fed and Sean Preston, so instead of sharing a forty of Schlitz to celebrate their newfound freedom from Sean’s crazy-ass moms, the two spend the next episode moping around Chief’s dank, gloomy quarters. (If my kid’s crib were a few feet from my head at night, I think I might want to kill myself, too. Having a baby isn’t always the best choice when you live in a walk-in closet.)

Chief, who suspects that Cally didn’t commit suicide like Tory said she did, deals with the pain by boozing it up. (Meanwhile, who’s at home with the kid? The Galactica seems to have a seriously abysmal day-care system. Maybe that’s something Baltar should take up with his rabble-rousing lady friends.) Once he’s good and drunk, Chief has a seriously shocking exchange with Commander Adama (and just to be clear, this one isn’t imaginary like the Oprah/prince Tom discussion above):

Tyrol: How many of us ended up with the people we really wanted to be with? Got stuck with the best of limited options. And why? Because the ones we really want, we really loved, are dead, or dying, turned out to be Cylons and they didn’t know it, like Boomer, and …

Adama: Let’s go.

Tyrol: No! I didn’t know. So I buried my head in the sand, and I took it and I settled. I settled for that shriek, those dull, vacant eyes, that boiled cabbage stench of her. And why? Because this is my life! This is the life I picked, and it’s fine. But you know, what? It’s not. I didn’t pick this life. This is not my frackin’ life!

Adama: What the hell’s gotten into you? Don’t do this. Don’t do this to her memory.

Tyrol: I’m sorry that I’m not going to do this the way you want me to, the way you might, but I will not make an angel out of somebody who wasn’t an angel.

Sweet Jesus, Chief, did you really hate her that much? Of course he’s right — Adama wouldn’t in a million years dream of revealing his darkest emotions to anyone, no matter what the circumstances. When Adama gets mad, he smashes priceless model ships into tiny little bits, but he doesn’t use words, no way!

Anyway, Chief continues to use his words until Adama demotes him, which also probably means Chief can trade in his walk-in closet for a broom closet. I wonder if he and Sean Preston can fit in that crib together?

Throw in the hybrid calling Starbuck “the harbinger of death,” Roslin going bald, Tigh struggling with visions of his dead wife, and Baltar gaining conviction in his spiritual notions, and you’ve got a pretty dark, soupy mess on your hands. Right now, the situation is darker than the Cylon occupation of New Caprica (which, aside from the torture and the unannounced assassinations, wasn’t all that dark, all things considered), maybe even darker than the days after the Cylon’s nuclear attack.

What does it all mean, Galactican groupies? Thankfully, Friday night’s episode was more suspense thriller (Hello, “Minority Report”!) than Lifetime movie of the week, but the repetitive spiritual questions aren’t all that compelling, and whenever the plot loses steam, some character loses his or her mind. Remember when the lunacy was limited to Baltar, while Richard Hatch’s Tom Zarek filled the need for a revolutionary underground? Making half of the characters on the show crazy feels like overkill — and we’ve seen it all before.

But then, we’ve seen dead horses, deadly cyclones, erupting volcanoes and dumb people with babies before, too. I guess you can’t teach an old God new tricks.