The real best about this tragedy

Rating: Null/10 (18 August 2019)

How the hell can any one prefer Jean Jacques Annaud's crap - ENEMY AT THE GATES - to this one, this true masperpiece. How? Oh, I know that the film made by the french director was an American feature produced by Hollywood, and so, you could not expect anything brutal, real, outstanding; you couldn't wait to see a neutral vision of the war. You could not expect to watch a picture where Russian and German soldiers, though on opposite sides, were both thrown in the same hell, the same grief, the same pain. This German film actually made it. But that's because it is a GERMAN point of view, the point of view of those who LOST the war. You have here no patriotic propaganda that you could see in Bondarchouk's film - in 2013 - about this so great victory for Ivan...I hate Russian movies about the Great Patriotic War, except COME AND SEE of course. In the other features, German soldiers are ALWAYS shown as idiots, barbarians - which they were in many cases, but not necessarily on the front line; For instance, in Stalingrad battle, there were no SS nor Einsatz kommandos, in charge of population extermination. There were only German fighters, not pure Nazis. The same with the Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps, in North Afrika. To summarize, I love the realistic way of filming and depicting characters. Remember CROSS OF IRON too.