Worth seeing, but caveats

Rating: 8/10 (18 May 2005)

As others have said, the film is brutal and visceral. Definitely worth watching; this is the kind of movie that would never be made in the United States (either by Hollywood or independents), for good or ill.
Examples of the "difference" include things like live ammunition being used for gunfire, and the fact that they actually machine-gunned a cow (and filmed a close-up of its death-throes).
However, I'd like to address an issue that seemed quite plain to me but others haven't touched on. People call this an anti-war movie, but I feel it works almost as well as anti-Nazi propaganda. The tone of this movie is unrelentingly bitter and every instance of anti-war sentiment can be interpreted as an indictment on the brutality of the Nazis.
I'm not trying soft-sell anything perpetrated by Germany during the war, but merely contrast the way that an anti-war movie would be made by the West. In every serious war movie I'm familiar with, there is a strong sense of regret and ambivalence over the actions of both sides. The message that you walk away with is "both sides are capable of committing terrible acts." But this film squarely puts the acts of evil in the hands of an almost cartoonish (although terrifying) "enemy" that would seem over-the-top in "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Perhaps things were as bad as this; perhaps this is the directors way of showing how traumatized the boy was by what he witnessed. But the fact remains that the Russians are universally portrayed to be good and suffering and heroic, given the circumstances. Even the denouement of the film, showing the destroyed German force, would indicate that ultimately the partisans, with their rifles & handful of mortars, were capable of destroying an body equipped with armor, air support and plenty of fresh lobster.
The most glaring point was the final scene, where the Germans are shot by the partisans instead of being burned alive. Given what had come before, I felt this showed a "turn the other cheek" attitude that simply wasn't reflected in the historical realities, where advancing Russian forces gave back nearly as well as they got, burning entire German towns , with plenty of rapes & atrocities to go around.
I understand that war movies almost invariably portray the protagonists as rising above their enemies level of barbarism, but given the portrayal of the horrors visited upon them by the Germans, I didn't buy it. The ending smacked of propaganda, and I would have preferred the film to conclude after the destruction of the village - the anti-war message would have been complete.