Hugely uneven WWII film

Rating: 5/10 (2 August 2010)

There are scenes taking place that appear to be non-sequiturs; several lightly armed Russians going to some distant 'warehouse' to secure food in the boonies after their particular village has been savagely attacked (though there's no explanation provided to explain how so many villagers escaped the Nazi extermination regiment that left a mound of bodies next to a walled house on the outskirts of town.). Then we cut to a scene where the same men are running for their lives seemingly pursued only by a fixed and unseen machine gun's bullets. Not a clearly thought out scene! Another: Florya and a companion have requisitioned a cow. Suddenly massive tracer-laden machine gun fire inundates the area the three are in but the only casualty is one of the men. Question: How do you miss a standing cow in the field? (Answer: The cow is then killed for better theatrical value.) The director, Klimov, born in 1933, seems to never have seen a movie. How else to explain long, long static shots of people that provide no additional information about them. He's also deficient in any editing aesthetic after 1919; Mr. Klimov: your time is our time and you waste much of it in shots that need editing. Even the extraordinary section of the movie showing the horror of the destruction of the village.....and it is an extraordinary war horror section.....has a scene where a Nazi officer, about to die a violent death, delivers pure pedantic-inspired dicta. Propaganda, not reality and the scene stops cold in its tracks while this character speaks. The reverse-images montage near the end is something the illiterate and unschooled Florya couldn't possibly have been exposed to. Why hang this lecture on the kid? Yes, a powerful film but heavily uneven.