Best movie describing the Eastern Front, but...

Rating: 8/10 (2 June 2013)

The movie has a lot of good points, as have been shown in other review.
However, the battle scenes in this movie are a little bit silly in my eyes:
1. At the beginning battle of the movie, the storm company (or battalion?) was tasked to overwhelm the defenders of the factory. The captain wanted to close the quarter quietly and launch the offensive without rousing the defenders. Yet, a rifle was fired unwillingly by an infantry who jumped in, which waked up the defenders and caused a lot of casualties in the attacking force. Later, the captain gave the soldier a hand-grenade to eliminate the machine-gun which is mowing down the German soldiers. That soldier just ran toward the machine-gun without much dodging movements, not even lowering his body. And he didn't get mowed down by the machine-gun.
This contradicted the usual common sense. What's more, the German hand-grenade's advantage is its throwing distance, but the explosive in it is not as much as the U.S. fragmentation ones. So I am quite doubtful that a potato-masher would destroy a machine-gun pillbox, as shown in the movie. Plus, Stalingrad would not have gained its nickname "Street-fight Academy" if the defender's position is so easy to overthrow. In the ruins of the Stalingrad, it is impossible to imagine such a single machine-gun pillbox without supporting cross-fire from other directions. If it were that simple, the 6th Army would have captured the city long before the winter began.
2. In the middle of the movie, over the snow-covered steppe, Lieutenant Witzland's platoon is ordered to hold an area where the Russian wanted to break in with their tanks. The soldiers either used Panzerfaust to give the tank a direct hit, or waited in the foxhole until the tank rolled over, and attached the ad-hoc high-explosive to its rear-engine part to break it down. After that, the infantry soldiers attached to the tank or behind it were mowed down by German MP40 or MG42.
As far as I know, the usual way of fighting with a mixed mechanized formation is to let the infantry soldiers come forward to scout the hidden enemy fire positions, to expose them and let them be licked up by the up-coming tanks. No, the tanks would never thrust forward by themselves. That way, they would be easy targets for Panzerfausts or Bazookas. The tanks would go all by themselves only in very large formations, say, a tank division or a tank army. In that case, the enemy would not have a chance to come behind the leading tanks and explode them from behind - anyone who tried to do this would be mowed down by the machine-gun in the following-up tanks.
In short, the movie is successful in humanizing the German soldiers fighting in Stalingrad, but it made a big mistake in over-simplifying the battle scenes and under-estimating the Russian force too much, just the same errors commit by the Fuhrer and General Staff of Wehrmacht.
The Russian would not have won the Battle of Stalingrad if they fought in the way described in the movie.