Not great but Still a Must See

Rating: 7/10 (11 March 2015)

What was the Battle of Stalingrad like? Probably nobody knows exactly, even if they survived it. We can guess -- house to house, floor-to-floor, and room-to-room killing in the bombed remnants of stone and concrete shells of buildings, basements, sewers, and wreckage, throughout a large, destroyed city, hundreds of thousands of men intent on killing each other, all this going on month after month for how long -- it had to be a hellish pandemonium that defies imagination.
This film tries to bring us into that pandemonium. To an amazing degree, it succeeds. Maybe not everything shown is accurate. But many scenes ring true enough. More than one source has claimed that Russian Army punishment was severe for retreating soldiers, and that families were threatened if their son got captured, or surrendered. We know some of the Volga crossings were bloodbaths, as were clashes throughout the ruined downtown. The bombings, the shelling, the snipers, the civilian and military life driven into and under the rubble, we know these things happened. This movie brings us there, in so much detail, you can't get it all in one viewing. The sets are simply amazing.
Along with all that great stuff, Jude Law is cute, and same for Rachel Weisz (somehow she defied the odds and grew even more beautiful 11 years later in the Bourne Legacy).
So what's missing? Well, the writing could be better. Jean-Jacques Annaud made his first (and apparently only) try at feature screen writing in this film. Why they let him do that, who knows. What couldn't a real writer do with this material? Stalingrad was the the mother of hell on earth! The Nazis were in a mortal drive to the Caspian oil fields. And the legendary Russian snipers! The film brings us Vassily Zaitsev, a real life legendary shooter. Why stop with him? Some of the best Russian WWII snipers were beautiful young women! The lovely, 19-year-old Ludmilla Pavilchenko (over 300 kills) was honored -- while the war was raging -- in London and Washington, even receiving gifts of a 1911 Colt and a Winchester rifle at the White House, before she returned to the war. Another sweet young killer, Roza Shanina, had 54 confirmed kills. It gets even more perfect: Vassily perfected a system of snipers working in threes. You want a story, maybe with a love triangle? The drama practically writes itself. Annaud does put one young woman sniper in the action (played by the lovely Austrian Sophie Rois), but her role is horrible, and short -- she knows how to work her trade in a bombed-out rubble of a department store, but when a wave of German bombers flies over, she panics and runs out into the Nazi shooting gallery.
The story: a love triangle. Smart guy makes a good try, but loses pretty brilliant girl to honest farm boy. But it doesn't hold interest, with the exception of a great love scene. Subplot 11-year old becomes a double agent, somehow passing from the German-occupied rubble mounds to the Russian-held sewers and basements pretty much every day, never even getting very dirty! The final shootout seems tacked on without much thought.
Back to those incredible sets. If you get pay per view, make sure there's a rewind option for this one.