A Big Disappointment

Rating: 4/10 (6 January 2004)

Firstly, I must say that my review is not unbiased. I am an avid WWII historian with a deep fascination of the Russian side of it. The Russians suffered over 20 million dead in that war and bore the major brunt of the Nazi defeat, yet their contributions are virtually ignored in this country. So when I learned that a major movie was being made about the pivotal battle of Stalingrad, and from the Russian perspective no less, I was giddy as a school boy and counted the days till its release.
What a letdown. I walked out of the theater feeling cheated.
A brief storyline. The movie follows Vassili Zaitsev, a young Russian soldier thrown into the hell of Stalingrad. He turns out to have quite a talent for picking off Germans, and his story is latched onto by an ambitious political officer who inflates his deeds in the Soviet press to almost mythic levels. The Germans catch wind of his fame and dispatch an expert marksman of their own to bring Zaitsev down, and a duel of the Stalingrad snipers begins.
First I'll point out what I liked about the movie. The technical accuracy was superb. The uniforms, equipment, and scenery were all dead on the mark (I did catch a glimpse of a Soviet helmet with a post-war Czech liner, but that's splitting hairs). They even made the effort to replicate some famous Stalingrad landmarks, and the special effects and cinematography were masterful. The highlight of the movie was when he gets off the train and sees the battered city for the first time from across a corpse-strewn river, a river that he must now cross.
Now for what I hated:
1. Even though the movie was taken from the excellently written and entirely factual book of the same name, the movie itself is pure fiction. In fact Zaitsev's story takes up all of two pages in the book. Much like with Braveheart they took a bare skeleton of actual events and pretty much made up everything else. This to me is a great and unforgivable sin.
2. The love scene. It was totally inappropriate and unnecessary, not to mention it looked like he was killing her rather than making love to her. Did the producer hope to draw in women viewers with that crap? Certainly no war movie buffs that I know want to see that kind of garbage.
3. Zaitsev's character. Vasili Zaitsev was in his 40s when this story takes place, and he was a trained sniper. He wasn't a Hollywood pretty-boy with gel in his hair.
4. The ending sequence. I don't want to spoil things for anyone, but these two supposedly 'expert' snipers violate every known rule in sniperdom. They weren't quite Johnny Rambo, but the sniper game is one of stealth and patience, and neither one display it.
But I guess my loudest complaint is that this movie had sooooo much potential, and this story sooooo needs to be told in this country. However, instead of sticking to the facts and appealing to purist nutcakes (like me) they had to pollute it with their Hollywood 'improvements' in an attempt to market to a mass audience, which only succeeded in alienating everybody. This could easily have become a great classic war movie like Patton or Band of Brothers, and I truly mourn for what could have been. Go out and buy the book, you will be a better person for it. Overall 2/5.