A big subject alone doesn't make a good film

Rating: Null/10 (7 March 2001)

This is not a good film. It lacks the precise imagination needed to reinvent history and make it look real. Everything here has been done before in other movies, and usually much better. The gotterdamerung street battle in the first half looks like parts of APOCALYPSE NOW, over-lit, garish, and literally over-orchestrated, carried along by constant music. (Coppola, of course, was making a point about Viet Nam which is hardly relevant here.)
The sewers sequence adds nothing to this sub-genre. How effective this scene could have been if the characters had just been illuminated by small flames, and then, when one of them gunned a flame-thrower, suddenly the vast cavern would be revealed in a brief glimpse. But, no, the sequence is totally floodlit in rainbow colors, like a Pennsylvania cave tour. How thoughtful of the Stalingrad city council to fully light all their sewers!
The significance of the battle of Stalingrad is that more soldiers died in this battle than any other; one million Russians died, and the entire German Army of 400,000 was wiped out. Yet here we have the impression that the battle was fought by a small group; everywhere they go the protagonists seem to meet the same people. It particularly strains credulity that the Russian girl they meet in the sewers shows up later. In this respect (and others) it's reminiscent of THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE, a massive operation reduced on film to a cavalry mission. It seems odd that in a battle where an entire army perished, the emphasis in the end is on two people alone on a vast landscape.
Another troubling thing is that though the German army is surrounded, apparently getting out and returning home is an option if one wants to "crap out."
The film shows little imagination, and repeats all the standard dramatic tricks of other war films (both in the action sequences and the interminably talky ones), which results in the failure of the filmmakers' expressed purpose, to show that there is no glamour of war by choosing as their subject a battle with massive casualties.