Adrian S

I highly recommend this film. For those people not familiar with military history, the Battle of Stalingrad was perhaps the bloodiest single engagement in human history and a disastrous turning point for the German armed forces, who previously had enjoyed an uninterrupted string of victories. This is the only decent and accurate (fictional) film portrayal of it that I know of. Told from the German perspective, it is rare among war films in that it never dehumanizes the combatants (neither Russians nor Germans), while accurately (and often brutally) depicting the horrors of war. No evil Nazis, no big bad Russians, no Private Ryans or General Pattons, just generally decent, sometimes petty and foolish, and altogether relatable men caught up in and eventually crushed by the wheels of history. The fictional story follows a group of soldiers sent from Western Europe to the Stalingrad front. Immediately encountering scores of wounded men and relative chaos in the ranks, they realize this will not be like the war thus far. The film compresses the historical timeline, and we see things deteriorate at every level for these men until all coherence and hope evaporates into the fog of war. The battle was infamous for its brutality, fighting often descending into hand to hand and room to room savagery, all amidst a surreal bombed out landscape of twisted steel and rubble that had once been a thriving city. All of this, the bleakness, the brutal cold, the filth, is captured by the film in full detail. In my opinion it also gives a fair treatment of the officers and generals of the Wehrmacht who, though perhaps not all Nazis at heart, were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands through their moral blindness and myopic quests for battlefield renown. Some have called this an anti war film; perhaps, but it would be difficult to make a film about this subject that did not make war seem awful and pointless. Certainly, if you are looking for an uplifting tale of patriotism and heroism, you will likely be disappointed. But for students of history and those of us who wonder how “normal people” can be driven to savage behavior, this film is a great addition to others like it, such as “Das Boot”, “Platoon”, “Come and See”, “Full Metal Jacket”, etc.