An Epic That Might Have Been

Rating: Null/10 (18 September 2002)

Ultimately this attempt, though well intentioned, was a disappointment. I read William Craig's book back in the seventies, in fact it was the first serious book I'd ever read, so when the movie came out, I was eager to see it. Making a movie about the Battle of Stalingrad is an obviously difficult thing to do--much harder than D-Day, or likely any other battle, the scope of the thing is hard to fathom.
So, in essence, they didn't film the battle, but rather tried out a metaphorical battle--one between two snipers rather than two massive armies. The first ten or twenty minutes sets some of the stage, but the context is largely left out. Just the fact that they made a movie about one totalitarian brutal vicious regime in a death struggle with another totalitarian brutal vicious regime is something of a daring task, at least for American audiences--since we, as a rule, don't have much use for totalitarian brutal vicious regimes. It gives no real hero to root for--they try to make up for this by making Jude Law, the Russian sniper, just a poor rural boy caught up in things he doesn't understand and sets him up against an aristocratic German Nazi who's obviously somewhat gung ho about his work.
They also try and make up for the brutal context by adding in an insipid love story that overclouds other very positive elements of the movie.

The movie makers should have done a number of things: First they should have watched "Cross of Iron" by Sam Peckinpah, the only other western movie I can think of depicting the Soviet-Nazi conflict (the "eastern front"). I'm sure there are many movies, just very few that are played in the U.S. In Cross, they put a number of men in an impossible situation, and don't try and gloss over the nature of the conflict--it just is.
The next thing they should have done is rewritten the entire premise--bringing Stalingrad down to just two snipers shooting at each other is an interesting concept, but it undercuts the vastness of the battle; maybe they were trying a metaphor, or some such nonsense, but it seems they just wasted a rather impressive set that could really have depicted the battle with some accuracy.
I found it ironic that the Russians spoke in English accents, since, for some reason, as a rule, Nazis seem to speak in English accents in many WWII movies--not a criticism, just an interesting reversal.

Any movie about Stalingrad is likely worth seeing, if only because Americans don't usually know much about it, we could benefit from some more info on the subject. But this movie is so much less than it could have been. Disappointing.