"You didn't know it would turn out like this, did you?"

Rating: 10/10 (20 November 2017)

It's probably a good thing that we have movies like this that show the brutality and evil of war, but I don't know if the mass of humanity ever learns from them. In recent days I've watched this movie and "The Battle of Algiers", and if you look at present day headlines and follow news of terrorism around the world, one must concede that the aggressive use of force is a distinct part of Man's nature. This is a viscerally disturbing film to watch, with scene after scene of intense brutality that would render a normal person who experienced it dysfunctional and mentally unhinged from reality.
It's those utterly insane things that young Florya Gaishun (Aleksey Kravchenko) experiences after he quite enthusiastically joins the war effort against the Nazis in his home country of Byelorussia. The most disturbing scene for this viewer occurred when the German soldiers herded the citizens of Perekhody into a barn and set it on fire. A rationale offered later by a young captured German soldier reflected a hideous ideology, that all Russians needed to be exterminated and children had to die because 'the trouble starts with them'. To claim that this warped Nazi thinking belonged to butchers is an understatement; that's too kind a word to apply to the monsters that they were.
I'm appreciative for having watched this movie, it's story and images will remain with me a long time. Some consider it the greatest war movie of all time, and though I would disagree, I would point to "All Quiet on the Western Front" as another film with a similar emotional impact and rates a similar rating to this one on IMDb, the point of difference being that 'All Quiet' was made in 1930 and relates the horror that took place during World War I. Both films ought to be a timely reminder that war is hell, and can turn one's life into something unimaginable in an instant.