jvdesuit1 Nearly 2am in Paris this Sunday. I've watched this movie, this morning and still cant take out of my head the views and sound. This is probably as many here say the best movie ever made on WWII.We're very far from the eternal Hollywoodian productions, with more or less happy endings, carefully edited not to shock ears or eyes with crude words or views. Joseph Vilsmaier goes straight to the facts. Even if the beginning with its views of the beaches of Italy gives an impression of gradation to the subject, we're very quickly confronted to the reality of what was to happen: young guys who would prefer to be attending their everyday life with families and friends and brought into a storm by a megalomaniac scoundrel named Hitler.The best example of this is the huge lie of the general in the scene at the beginning of the film when he states that Germany has been victorious at El Alamein!All along the movie, we can feel the sense of betrayal of the battalion and Hans. It's a huge crescendo just as the horrors of the situations lived by those men increases. Another aspect of the way the film is shot, is at the same time a terrible sense of loneliness. Progressively each character transmits to the audience this terrible feeling of being abandoned to fate and elements i.e. the climate. The director and the writer have made a fantastic analysis of the human nature and its reaction to this terrible trauma. And you cant help thinking, how would I react in such circumstances?.Joseph Vilsmaier has succeeded not to drop in the great mistake of Jean-Jacques Annaud's version of Stalingrad (Enemy at the gate) which is the relative happy ending. Whatever the facts you depict in a movie treating of this battle, there cant be a positive or happy ending for any of the protagonists. A simple figure attests of it: it is estimated that of the 100000 German POW only 5000 survived and returned to their country.This is a great movie, and each adolescent should view it to keep in its memory what the so called superiority of a nation can be driven to if by nationalistic propaganda it is driven to expansionism.This is true on any continent, whether America, Europe or Asia. History repeats itself whether we like it or not and there is always somewhere a mad man to exploit economic circumstances leading to such horrors. France and England have had a huge responsibility in the arrival of Hitler because of the stupid Versailles treaty and the way we ruined the German economy opening the gates to hatred on one side and credulity of a starving nation to the propaganda and lies of its filthy new leader in the 30s.

CosmoFelani I have wanted to watch this film for many years but only got around to it last week. Many reviewers have highlighted the fact that this is not a Hollywood treatment, which can be a positive. But for anyone who has been exposed to the realism of Saving Private Ryan and similar movies, the absence of Hollywood production values and standards of acting and realism make Stalingrad hard to take seriously. It is highly theatrical, in the sense that the acting is over the top and the motivations and actions of most of the characters do not line up with anything that I'd call realistic, in terms of what I have read about the battle itself or based on what one would consider believable human behavior. Very simplistic in all respects. Probably would have been quite OK in 1993, when it was released, but by today's standards, not something I would recommend.

Nick Fletcher Stalingrad is not the best war film. At times, I found the sub-par acting by extras and use of stock sound effects really killed the depth of a scene. I also found that I couldn't keep a track of which characters were which, this may have been due to similar faces and language barriers creating trouble with indistinguishable accents. Between scenes, there would be such large gaps in time that you wouldn't be able to tell how a situation arose or what the situation was in some cases, making the story hard to follow. These factors limited my ability to feel the exhaustion and suffering of the characters, and left me slightly disengaged.The reason for my high mark, however, is attributed to the final scenes. The raw emotion coming from the few remaining actors is highly visible on this precious smaller scope, and the eventual plight of each character is played out in such devastating detail that I sat in silence in a dark room long after the credits had finished rolling and felt compelled after to even write some poetry.If you came to this film to see the struggle of a battle, you could do better, but stick around for the ending, it's very much worth it.

Bene Cumb For losers of a war or a battle, it is not customary to create something depicting their defeat, especially if this happened not so long time ago. E.g., Russians have had several defeats in the post WW II period - could you imagine them picturing this? With Stalingrad 1993, Germans have crudely shown the horrors and sufferings in one of the most severe battles in the WW II, without glorifying themselves and without scoffing at their enemy. On the other hand, Soviet Russia was no innocent victim, its treatment of own and neighboring people in the 1930ies was nasty and lethal as well, and Soviet (non-)activities were largely a reason why Hitler had courage to start this horrible war.As for the movie, the events and background seem realistic (probably shot in Finland), most of actors performing Russians speak decent Russian, and leading men are catchy to follow (primarily Dominique Horwitz as Obergefreiter Fritz Reiser, Thomas Kretschmann as Leutnant Hans Von Witzland, Jochen Nickel as Unteroffizier Manfred "Rollo" Rohleder). However, some of the scenes could have been shortened, and direct battle scenes comprise only a small part of the movie. The ending is predictable, although the scenes leading to it are well directed. It seems that the creators wanted to combine profound human aspect with concrete battle, but for this task, the movie was too short - a miniseries could have been more appropriate. Nevertheless, if you like war movies based on real events, Stalingrad is worth watching.