Compelling In Parts But Let Down By Clichéd And Contrived Elements

Rating: 7/10 (23 November 2012)

The battle of Stalingrad is beyond human imagination . It is an event in history that sends a shiver down the spine . Nazi Germany lost one quarter of its total strength on the Eastern front during this one battle . That's if you can even call it a battle , the number of forces involved meant it was more of campaign . And if the scale of the battle wasn't mind numbing enough it's the conditions and ferocity of the fighting that sticks in the mind . As a young schoolboy in the 1970s I vividly remember reading accounts " that every brick in every house in every street was bitterly fought over " . Even in the 21st century with the invasion of Iraq military experts have to emphasise that the capture of Baghdad wouldn't resemble Stalingrad in anyway . In short if you want to visualize war at its most cruel and brutal pick up a history book on Stalingrad . You almost feel sorry for the bad guys . I did say " almost"
This is a slight problem with this cinematic account of the battle . STALINGRAD is a very well regarded German film and being a German film it feels the need to make a very clear line between good Germans who are portrayed as the ones who are conscripted in to the Wermacht who do all the fighting and dying in pursuit of Nazi ideals and bad Germans who blindly follow Nazi genocidal laws and never serve in the front line. Even the classic DAS BOOT suffers from this viewpoint . The only film that doesn't portray villains as Nazis is the Anglo German production CROSS OF IRON which has a Prussian aristocrat as the bad German . Would it not be a nice change that Germans murdering innocent people weren't necessarily goose stepping Nazis ? The truth is there were plenty of ordinary Wermacht units implicated in crimes against humanity on the Eastern front in the early 1940s
For the majority of the film director Joseph Vilsmaier and screenwriter Jurgen Buscher tend to ignore politics and concentrate on making an anti-war film on a grand epic scale . They succeed too as a battalion of 400 men is quickly drained to a troop of 62 men carrying out full frontal assaults against desperate Soviet defenders . The film makers also make a very important point that Nazi Germany was a Christian nation and include a scene where a padre addresses a congregation emphasising that the Germans have God on their side where as the Bolsheviks are Godless atheists . This scene alone meant I could easily forgive the slight clichés that creep in to the film
Slight clichés are easily forgiven . Unfortunately the more the film goes on the more clichés come firing at the audience quicker than a Soviet counter-attack . What become even more unforgivable is the introduction of very contrived plotting as in " Someone must do something unlikely and even more unlikely a character who they already know appears to move the plot forward " A number of people who dislike this movie have pointed out the unlikely coincidences of characters who appeared in the film earlier appear and they're right . It's not enough to destroy the film but a battle on the scale of Stalingrad to have people bumping in to each other the way it happens here strains all credibility . Likewise the final third of the film is rather static where people have existentialist discussions and feels more like a German New Wave film from Rainer Werner Fassbinder
In short STALINGRAD is a film I always wanted to see since it was released almost 20 years ago . It was worth the wait . It's a sweeping epic war film and is much praised for the battle sequences . It isn't flawless and unfortunately the flaws are very easy to spot and take issue with . As it stands CROSS OF IRON still remains the best film featuring the carnage and hell of fighting on the Eastern front