Unfortunately Forgettable

Rating: Null/10 (14 April 2001)

For a movie about one of the most epic battles in history this one comes across a bit shallow. In fact you'd never guess this was an epic battle just from watching this movie. You could say this is just a small episode of this battle, but not when you have dialogue like "you can win the war for us" thrown in there. It makes the duel sound far more important then it was and makes it seem as if the whole battle was decided by the duel (like in the middle ages). Also the director probably thought he was being clever by throwing in some elements of politics, but that just detracts from the movie by leaving threads which lead nowhere. For example the sniper that says all his teeth were knocked out by his own people (the NKVD). This is an interesting topic in and of itself but adds nothing to the movie since it barely scratches the surface (and it's wrong at that, he would have been sent to a forced labor camp, and how he made it out to fight is a mystery). Then there is this obvious fear of showing the red army as the good guys. Why that should even be an issue is beyond me. And yet we are forced to listen to people having doubts about the system. Not only was this uncommon among those who weren't aware of the purges, but you wouldn't dare say such things out loud. And it does a great deal of disservice to the people who gave their lives for their motherland without thinking twice about it. This isn't even apparent during the charging attack scenes. Those soldiers didn't need much motivation, it is in fact their insane bravery which gave them the edge in the first place. This is something that the movie fails to show. The director also tries hard to make the opening scenes more dramatic by making the soldiers very poorly armed. But while very true in the beginning of the war, it wasn't quite the same by the Battle of Stalingrad. Also we are talking about more then a million people involved in very bitter fighting for every street, every house, every room! This could have made for very dramatic scenes but it's totally missing. And then there is that tacked on, borrowed from Hollywood love triangle. It doesn't exactly add anything to the plot either. I mean at least stick to the facts, make Zaitsev give her sniping lessons for instance. This way we learn more about snipers, and see a bond develop between them, but this? Also there are little annoying details which might not be too important but are very distracting. The accents that everyone keeps mentioning are a real issue. When those actors speak in those British accents you instantly identify them as just that, British! It's not just English, it's a very specific dialect from a very specific place. Really, subtitles would have worked better, and even Russian actors for that matter, as unlike Jude Law, Joseph Feinnes doesn't look even remotely Russian! There are so many more things to go into but I can best sum it up this way : the Russian movie on Zaitsev (part of a big "liberation" series), is superior, though it was done on a mere fraction of the budget and no stars to speak of.