a good movie, but the usual political incomprehension

Rating: Null/10 (2 April 2001)

I liked this movie on the whole, it's a lot better than most war flicks. However, there was the usual western conflation of Stalinism with Marxism. For decades we had two superpowers telling us that Soviet Stalinists were the true Marxists, and in the west, we all too happily believed it (needing to believe as we do, that all anti-capitalist politics must inevitably lead to tyranny.) I didn't find the anti-Soviet portrayal at all unrealistic, but what I think would have been a REAL challenge for the filmmakers would have been to have a staunchly Marxist Russian character who was therefore also staunchly anti-stalinist. How about some guy who hated the Nazis, but also what Stalin and his apparatchiks had made of Marx? Instead, we have the character who makes the obligatory statement that "no new man is possible" (a direct shot at Marx) and that there "will always be envy" etc. or words to that effect -- the usual cosmic fatalism of the west. Had this little speech gone on a little longer, I think we could have expected to hear the usual capitalist conclusion: since man is a selfish bastard, let him live in a selfish system: i.e. capitalism. People who dream of a better world only give birth to Stalins, and yadda yadda yadda. The political message of the film is clear: the only good Russian is one with no politics incompatible with the capitalist western status quo.