As Soviet troops charge madly across the ruined city square into the teeth of German machine-gunners, a berserker's cry on their lips, their officers piping shrilly on metal whistles, Stanley Kubrick's great indictment of World War I, Paths of Glory , leaps to mind. Only here the narrator is Zaitsev himself, and the image doesn't open the film but occurs in route, as if the future hero tuned suddenly into his own internal propaganda channel in order to steel himself for battle. Annaud is a visually exciting director. As Zaitsev and his comrades steam across the Volga to reinforce a city plumed with towers of fire and smoke, their boat convoy is picked at by German dive bombers which swoop and swarm like the birds from Alfred Hitchcock's famous film. The camera is crouched among the boat's occupants.
Ships explode into fireballs.
Water gushes over the sides. Bodies are ripped apart. It's the landing scene from Saving Private Ryan but with a cruel historical twist. Stalin decreed death for anyone who retreats, and his henchmen execute his orders with terrible literalness. Any Soviet soldier jumping ship to escape Nazi bombs gets a Soviet bullet in the head.