Journey into horror...

Rating: 10/10 (22 February 2014)

Nearly 2am in Paris this Sunday. I've watched this movie, this morning and still cant take out of my head the views and sound. This is probably as many here say the best movie ever made on WWII.
We're very far from the eternal Hollywoodian productions, with more or less happy endings, carefully edited not to shock ears or eyes with crude words or views. Joseph Vilsmaier goes straight to the facts. Even if the beginning with its views of the beaches of Italy gives an impression of gradation to the subject, we're very quickly confronted to the reality of what was to happen: young guys who would prefer to be attending their everyday life with families and friends and brought into a storm by a megalomaniac scoundrel named Hitler.
The best example of this is the huge lie of the general in the scene at the beginning of the film when he states that Germany has been victorious at El Alamein!
All along the movie, we can feel the sense of betrayal of the battalion and Hans. It's a huge crescendo just as the horrors of the situations lived by those men increases. Another aspect of the way the film is shot, is at the same time a terrible sense of loneliness. Progressively each character transmits to the audience this terrible feeling of being abandoned to fate and elements i.e. the climate. The director and the writer have made a fantastic analysis of the human nature and its reaction to this terrible trauma. And you cant help thinking, how would I react in such circumstances?.
Joseph Vilsmaier has succeeded not to drop in the great mistake of Jean-Jacques Annaud's version of Stalingrad (Enemy at the gate) which is the relative happy ending. Whatever the facts you depict in a movie treating of this battle, there cant be a positive or happy ending for any of the protagonists. A simple figure attests of it: it is estimated that of the 100000 German POW only 5000 survived and returned to their country.
This is a great movie, and each adolescent should view it to keep in its memory what the so called superiority of a nation can be driven to if by nationalistic propaganda it is driven to expansionism.
This is true on any continent, whether America, Europe or Asia. History repeats itself whether we like it or not and there is always somewhere a mad man to exploit economic circumstances leading to such horrors. France and England have had a huge responsibility in the arrival of Hitler because of the stupid Versailles treaty and the way we ruined the German economy opening the gates to hatred on one side and credulity of a starving nation to the propaganda and lies of its filthy new leader in the 30s.