A strangely muted 'epic'

Rating: Null/10 (12 February 2001)

The battle for Stalingrad was probably *the* greatest battle of the last century and turned the tide of World War II. For some reason this film doesn't reflect the gigantic scale of the conflict or the issues involved, despite the horrifically realistic battle-scenes.
While I can understand the film-makers wanting us to identify with a specific group of soldiers to make the story understandable on a human level, only the scenes of crowds at Pitomnik airfield queuing for the last flight out of the doomed city to show us that a quarter of a million men were in the same position.
The film takes a purely German viewpoint. The men depicted here, however, don't take part in 'cleansing' Stalingrad of Jews and Communists, don't evict peasants from their homes leaving them to freeze on the steppe, and don't take souvenir photographs of death-squads at work, all activities indulged in by German troops. These soldiers are tragic figures, caught in events not of their making.
Their enemy is largely invisible. The efforts of the Russians to hang on to the slightest strip of Stalingrad, ferrying troops back and forth through pack ice in the frozen Volga under German artillery and machine gun fire is never depicted. Taking this view, both groups were equally victims: the Germans of Hitler's crazed desire to take 'Stalin's city', the Russians of Stalin's ruthless determination to deny the prize.
By failing to show the scale of the battle, and in its one-sided view of those involved, the film is diminished and fails to live up to the promise of its subject.