Deeply Flawed

Rating: 4/10 (9 December 2005)

With all of its technical flash, the 1993 "Stalingrad" movie is very disappointing. Before watching it I had read non-fiction accounts of the Stalingrad campaign and had seen a lot of documentary footage and photographs of the actual battle and its participants. I don't think that any movie can really succeed in depicting the titanic struggle and suffering that actually occurred, but I still wanted to see what a relatively recent German movie production would be like. While there are a few good elements of this movie, overall it is a failure. To me the worst aspect is that it includes substantial anachronisms, and also some very contrived and clichéd elements, most glaringly in some encounters between a German officer and a Soviet woman.
Also there are some ideological elements in the movie which result in very distorted perceptions, including what amounts to a caricature of a German chaplain, some overblown class-warfare messages, and problematic depictions of "good" vs. "bad" Germans. Certainly the German Armed Forces of World War II included men who were able to maintain some decency throughout the war, and others who did very bad things, but the attempts in the movie to show this contrast are very simplistic and childish. I give "Stalingrad" credit in the sense that it doesn't completely portray German troops in the simple demonic quality which is the stereotype that many people now have, yet the movie includes stereotypes of its own, such as an almost too-good-to-be-true infantryman who has attitudes more akin to the 1990's than the 1940's, and two completely evil infantrymen and a rear-echelon officer.
Some recent movies such as "Stalingrad" and "Saving Private Ryan" are frequently praised for their "authenticity" in depicting graphic scenes of combat, yet these same movies are deeply flawed and distorted in their depictions of the attitudes, values and behaviors of 1940's soldiers and civilians. "Stalingrad" and "S.P.R" have major and minor characters who lack the unselfconscious stoicism that was common among regular people during the World War II period. Certainly soldiers throughout history have been notorious for their frequent grumbling and occasional cynicism, yet the self-absorbed, talky and touchy-feely characters in both of these movies are something else, and are much more prevalent in our world of today than they were in the 1940's. While many people these days like to denigrate war movies from the 40's and 50's which present more patriotic messages and aren't as graphic about combat, many of those earlier movies such as "Battleground" are much more accurate in their depictions of typical soldiers' attitudes, and they are often successful in showing the horrible effects of war in more indirect ways.
One well-done part of "Stalingrad" is a battle between German infantry and Soviet tanks, which does a reasonable job of capturing some of the horror and confusion in such combat.
"Stalingrad" does a poor job though of showing the common look of the frontline soldier. Part of this might be due to the difficulty in finding thin, haggard-looking extras in our pampered and well-fed America and western Europe of today. Also, too many of the German troops in the movie don't wear their uniforms and equipment properly, and don't display the professional bearing that was common in the German Wehrmacht even during the years of German defeat. If you want to get a good idea of how the actual German troops looked, I recommend the following documentaries which contain footage of the Stalingrad campaign: "The World at War," "War of the Century" and "Russia's War." Also the books "Operation Barbarossa in Photographs" by Paul Carell, "Stalingrad" by Geoffrey Jukes and "Stalingrad" by Paul Carell contain a great many helpful photos. Books written about the battle by Antony Beevor and William Craig are recommended also, and the latter one is especially good about the common soldiers and civilians on both sides.
Relatively recent movies which, in my opinion, are much better than "Stalingrad" and "Saving Private Ryan" in depicting attitudes and characters of persons during World War II, and the general feel, look, horror and grittiness of that war, are "Der Untergang" ("The Downfall") and "Talvisota" ("The Winter War"). While "A Bridge Too Far" and "The Longest Day" cover events on the Western Front rather than in the East, they are also excellent war movies, and stick very close to factual accounts. The latter two movies lack some of the grit that is more prevalent in more recent films, but they compensate for that lack with their other strengths, including truthfulness.