Excellent WW2 movie with nice shots

Rating: Null/10 (18 December 2002)

...err, that was a bad pun, I guess. However, I would put this movie in one line with Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers and the excellent german Stalingrad movie.
It has plenty of battle scenes (although not quite as elaborate as the outstanding start end end battles in Ryan), a plot based on real characters (although Major König was propably neither a major nor that highly decorated, Zaitsev actually existed) and a nice tweak to conventional WW2 movies.
The madness of war is pointed out pretty well, with officers having scores of fleeing soviet infantry MG'ed for cowardry, the constant gun and artillery fire etc.
In contrast to one of the other commenters who mourned the lack of european actors on the movie, I'd like to point out that there is actually LOTS of Europeans, especially Germans.
Eva Mattes, Matthias Habich and Hans Martin Stier, which are all acclaimed actors here in Germany, take larger or smaller roles, and Ed Harris does actually a quite good portrait of a German Elite officer with an almost royal behavior.
And as a side note, all the Nazi extras are actually German, they speak without the slightest accent. Ryan's "Germans" were a bad joke to any native speakers, and the nazis in BoB were no native speakers, either. So that adds MUCH to the credibility of the movie.
Overall: 8 of 10.