I Like Watching Nazis Die

Rating: 7/10 (5 August 2007)

The opening scenes of this movie, that depict a peasant boy being taught to kill wolves, intercut with a scene of Soviet soldiers being mowed down by Nazi automatic fire, were very hard for this viewer to watch.
I'm not inured to cinematic violence. I wanted to give up on this movie for that reason. But, I had other reasons for watching it, so I continued.
The violence is very well crafted. I felt as if I were watching real men being mowed down by real Nazis. I cried.
The speeches commanders were giving their men -- reading letters from Russian mothers adjuring their boys to sacrifice for the motherland; informing men that deserters would be shot; the command, "The one who has the rifle shoots. The one who doesn't have the rifle follows him. When the one with the rifle gets shot, the one without the rifle, takes the rifle, and shoots," are movie lines I don't think I'll soon forget.
The performances are brilliant. Everyone, except, maybe, Bob Hoskins, who is depicted as simply older than Krushchev was at this time -- other than that, though Hoskins is good -- but everyone else is superb.
Rachel Weisz, without a touch of make-up, her eyebrows untweezed, is so beautiful, inside and out, you can see why two men are in love with her.
Jude Law is convincing as a Russian peasant who grew up to be a WW II sniper. This guy really is so much more than a pretty face. I think if he were not so good looking his deftness as an actor would be much more widely commented upon.
Joseph Fiennes brings great conviction, intelligence, craftiness and fire to his part as a Communist propagandist.
"Minor" roles are similarly knocked out of the park -- Eva Mattes as besieged housewife, Gebrial Marshall-Thomson as a little boy taking on the job of a very big man, Ron Perlman as a man who sees through Communism, Sophie Rois as a female sniper, add depth and texture.
Ed Harris as Major Konig really hypnotized me here. It was like watching a cobra in human form.
It's a good thing that a mainstream, big budget movie addressed the Soviet contribution to the war.
It's also a good thing that this movie is not any more romantic than it needs to be about what Soviet Communism was really all about, behind the slogans. At one point, a key character delivers a speech that is one of the best deconstructions of communism that I've ever heard.
I ask myself, "Would I watch this again? Why or why not?" I don't think I could ever watch this again -- it was just too hard, too unrelieved. Mud, death, corpses, killing. Yeah, that's war. Why the sensible among us don't like war.
I have another reservation about this movie. As hard as the opening scene was to watch, I watched it twice, at least partly because I knew it would be capped off with Zaitsev (Jude Law) the Russian sniper, swiftly picking off a handful of Nazi soldiers.
Again, I try to avoid violent entertainment, because I agree with research that shows that violent entertainment changes us in ways I'd rather not be changed.
When a movie makes me want to watch men die, I am fearful of what that movie is doing to me.
I did want to see those Nazis die. I enjoyed watching Zaitsev pick them off.
Part of the message of this movie is: lone, righteous man with gun solves problems by shooting bullets into other men's heads.
That gives me pause.
PS: James Horner's score may sound familiar to you. In fact, he is using bits of Prokofiev's score for the film "Alexander Nevsky." Nevsky, of course, depicts medieval battles with the (Germanic) Teutonic Knights, and was meant to be analagous with the Soviet struggle with Nazism. So, Horner's score's quotes from Prokofiev brings those motifs full circle.