Strong Drama Using Real People

Rating: 7/10 (4 March 2019)

When I watched this I was impressed by the effects. The acting is solid and the characters in the script really did exist. The trouble is that even though the film plays like this is all cut and dried fact, the story can not be verified, which makes it fiction.
Still, the film has good points for drama. The chaos of Stalingrad is something to behold, and like the recreation of other World War 2 battles, dramatic thrills are taken to get the viewer to like the story. There are things to like and some flaws.
For example, this film makes it look like the Russian Press was a Free Press operating on the front lines of the city. That is not very likely. Stalingrad has lots of propoganda being pushed out by both sides during the battle. So any basis on that account is most certainly fictional.
Jude Law's protrayal of the Stalinist sniper is quite good acting wise. His affari with Rachel Weitz womand soldier is quite good. Trouble is this affair on the front is not very likely to have happened the way it does in the film. It's not that the Russians did not use women in the Battle of Stalingrad, they did. It is that even in this chaos the Russian Military tried to keep the men and women in seperate units. In fact, the history as written by the Germans was that as the war progressed, the Germans did not want to fact the Russian Women's units, because they were more brutal than the men's units.
While there is a lot of fiction here, including the little boy spy, it is sold entertainment. If you get yourself wrapped up in the characters, you give it a 10 rating. I did not get that wrapped up and see some issues with the using of real people to dance to a fictional script. While the script by the director and one of Christopher Lees lesser Dracula films is good drama, to me this does not get up to the level of great drama. It just doesn't bring me to tears.
As for Rachel, well I can only imagine if she were really in a mixed sex unit how it would work out. She is a major asset, but the distraction from the story of one of many Russian snipers, and of Major Koneig of the Nazis, is strictly entertaining. Soviet sniper Vasily Zaytsev is glorified in Russian History, and this films attempts to glorify him even more by having him kill Erwin König, Nazi expert sniper. There is no way to verify it ever happened.