Russia 1,400,000, Germany 600,000

Rating: 8/10 (6 September 2004)

That's roughly the fatality score in the nastiest battle of WWII. Russia won and cracked the Wehrmacht in more ways than one at this turning point. Russia always had a higher body count, at least until near war's end, because they used their infantry as cannon fodder, and civilians added to the count. Russia could keep throwing bodies at the Germans, but the Germans couldn't sustain such a loss as the Russians finally pulled off a pincer movement of their own.
Although the battle includes entire armies, it is small unit action that is on the screen. Platoons and companies, sometimes a battalion. Except for a few recurring characters, largely anonymous actors come and go on the screen. This has been criticized but that is what large scale war is; an anonymous action of brutal firepower where combatants are routinely blown up, ripped apart and smashed. Survivors keep their sanity by a crude apathy about their fate, only occasionally breaking down when a foxhole buddy, a long-lived survivor finally gets eliminated. Such a loss is hard for them to take.
Stalingrad is not the goriest war movie I've ever seen but there's enough. The segment through the sewers was more disturbing for me to watch. Gah! I also think the horrible winter conditions were done well. All in all I'm very glad I've never had to suffer all the extreme hardships almost everyone there had to.
Almost everyone except the elite, of course. The movie just dances around that fact a bit, but the truth is even under the worst conditions the leadership managed to keep themselves relatively well cared for. General Paulus did not have to walk to Siberia; he became a showpiece for Stalin, and to his dying day cursed Hitler for not allowing him to retreat and save his men. Its a big What-if in history as how that might have changed the course of the war. As it was, only about 6,000 of the German POWs made it back alive after the war from this battle.
The movie has a detached feel to it which I think is deliberate, to give the sense of what war is like. But as a result, you don't feel engaged with the actors on the screen. I don't think Stalingrad has a high replay value. You get a taste of what such a bitter battle might be like, but who wants such a bitter experience more than once? It's a good movie to see once.
The DVD has both original German and English dub audio. I watched the subtitles because I wanted to hear the actors on the screen even if I didn't know what they actually all said. My subwoofer was silent and if anything came out of the surrounds I didn't notice. Almost no extras. The DVD is 7/10