Stalingrad (1994)

Stylish but barely mediocre overall

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Gives the true side of the German soldiers for once in a feature film production. Goes to in war only the few benefit, not the people. Many may attempt to downplay the film due to being filmed by Germans and showing humanity in the average German soldier, almost always glossed for in any other Hollywood flick for the masses to consume.

Any movie set in World War Two which depicts German soldiers as being just like any other soldiers in the war is at best naïve if not downright ridiculous. This movie is the German version of Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan. It is an attempt to depict the war from the German soldier's perspective. The problem is that despite the excellent acting and the harrowing story, the movie fails to generate any empathy or sympathy for the principal characters, all of whom are invaders. They suffer, yet it is suffering that the brought on themselves as representatives of Hitler. This factor cannot be ignored. It's too bad that the these soldiers went through a grinder, but they did it to themselves. Unlike the German soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front, for whom the futility of their suffering and their alienation generates real sympathy, the German soldiers depicted in this movie do not deserve an iota of respect. That the movie does a great job of depicting the battle from the front line soldier's perspective is commendable, but the movie comes up empty as dramatic story because we already know the ending, and it's not heroic.

This is a worthwhile movie and I have it on DVD in original German/Russian with subtitles. That certainly creates a certain atmosphere. I have also got Anthony Beaver's excellent historical book on the Battle Of Stalingrad. I understand what the Director was trying to do with the movie; the whole men are just men, the inhumanity of man, there are no winners in war etc. but to me the film didn't seem to quite know whether it wanted to be a depiction of the battle or an anti-war morality tale. It's called "Stalingrad" but Stalingrad is really just a stage set where the "Band of Brothers" theme can be played out. Some have said Enemy at the Gates is a better movie; I would say it is a complementary movie and between both movies we get a strong feel for what it must have been like to have been there and died. On a more general level I have the view that Cross of Iron is the best movie I have seen on the war on the Eastern Front while Downfall remains for me the best war movie of all. But put those 4 together and you have IMHO an comprehensive package regarding Hitler's folly in Russia.

The movie has a lot of good points, as have been shown in other review.However, the battle scenes in this movie are a little bit silly in my eyes: 1. At the beginning battle of the movie, the storm company (or battalion?) was tasked to overwhelm the defenders of the factory. The captain wanted to close the quarter quietly and launch the offensive without rousing the defenders. Yet, a rifle was fired unwillingly by an infantry who jumped in, which waked up the defenders and caused a lot of casualties in the attacking force. Later, the captain gave the soldier a hand-grenade to eliminate the machine-gun which is mowing down the German soldiers. That soldier just ran toward the machine-gun without much dodging movements, not even lowering his body. And he didn't get mowed down by the machine-gun.This contradicted the usual common sense. What's more, the German hand-grenade's advantage is its throwing distance, but the explosive in it is not as much as the U.S. fragmentation ones. So I am quite doubtful that a potato-masher would destroy a machine-gun pillbox, as shown in the movie. Plus, Stalingrad would not have gained its nickname "Street-fight Academy" if the defender's position is so easy to overthrow. In the ruins of the Stalingrad, it is impossible to imagine such a single machine-gun pillbox without supporting cross-fire from other directions. If it were that simple, the 6th Army would have captured the city long before the winter began.2. In the middle of the movie, over the snow-covered steppe, Lieutenant Witzland's platoon is ordered to hold an area where the Russian wanted to break in with their tanks. The soldiers either used Panzerfaust to give the tank a direct hit, or waited in the foxhole until the tank rolled over, and attached the ad-hoc high-explosive to its rear-engine part to break it down. After that, the infantry soldiers attached to the tank or behind it were mowed down by German MP40 or MG42.As far as I know, the usual way of fighting with a mixed mechanized formation is to let the infantry soldiers come forward to scout the hidden enemy fire positions, to expose them and let them be licked up by the up-coming tanks. No, the tanks would never thrust forward by themselves. That way, they would be easy targets for Panzerfausts or Bazookas. The tanks would go all by themselves only in very large formations, say, a tank division or a tank army. In that case, the enemy would not have a chance to come behind the leading tanks and explode them from behind - anyone who tried to do this would be mowed down by the machine-gun in the following-up tanks.In short, the movie is successful in humanizing the German soldiers fighting in Stalingrad, but it made a big mistake in over-simplifying the battle scenes and under-estimating the Russian force too much, just the same errors commit by the Fuhrer and General Staff of Wehrmacht.The Russian would not have won the Battle of Stalingrad if they fought in the way described in the movie.