A war movie where everyone is human?

Rating: Null/10 (20 January 1999)

I won't recap the good comments of everyone else - I'll limit myself to an observation. As an American soldier myself (albeit of the nautical variety), I appreciated the filmmakers making the German soldier a human being - I also appreciated how they also made the normally faceless enemy (as seen through a movie camera) human, as well. The viewer could sympathize with the common soldier, but was not spared the consequences of the common soldier's actions. I think they did a better job of it than most American filmmakers - we're good at portraying the violence and terror of war from the viewpoint of the soldier, but we hold back when it comes to depicting the cost to the (comparatively) innocent. Certainly, the Germans were freezing to death - and the central characters more than once saw their comrades turning Russians out to freeze to death. Certainly, the Germans were dying - and the central characters were confronted with a Russian woman grieving over two small children who had either been killed or starved or frozen to death. And what American movie depicts the armed enemy as "just a regular guy"? The Russian soldier dying next to the young German who had just accidentally killed his friend was far from the faceless enemy.
Besides all this, it was better to hear the soldiers speak German, even if I did have to read the subtitles.