Stalingrad

It has been quite a while since I had the chance to post a review – busy on the income front. So it seemed appropriate to sit back and watch something epic. This 2013 Russian tent pole looked interesting and did good business in its home territory. Maybe, I thought, it will also give an insight into the current Russian mindset with everything going on inside and outside the motherland’s borders. So here’s my report.

Firstly the two pictures above. One the left is the official film poster. On the right is the subtle main character identifier. The clue is the gun barrel.

The positives first; it looks really good – on par with the latest crop of computer games. There are masses of production values and clearly a lot of roubles spent (a LOT the way exchange rates go). This makes this a comparatively inexpensive film by Western standards, more bang per buck. Except the bang isn’t really targeted. This is not a Fury film. This is more like a box of ammo exploding somewhere on set, but no one is really looking in the right direction. From the start there is a really fake modern story line about an old guy working in a disaster zone which immediately has you doing mental calculations once you get that this is the narrator. You come to the conclusion he is a pensioner-rescuer! But maybe that’s how it is in modern Russia.

So we swim back to 1942 and suddenly the Volga is all action, there are lots of people trying to get to grips with the Nazi war machine and… hey! Just who is the central character? It is all awash like the boat crossing.  Talk about the fog of war, this is the fog of story. So after 10 or 15 minutes of this confusion a show of hands from the survivors and there, you’ve got the main not-dead leads, more or less.

So after filtering all the detritus that war throws at you and the cast one can’t help but then notice that there is a hard core patriotic message being tattooed with every machine gun stutter. While clearly Stalingrad was a defeat for the Nazi swine, Stalingrad (the film) is one massive can of whoop ass dished by the heroic boys in green/grey/mud/rags. The good news is that there really wasn’t a desperate, brutal Communist machine grinding Soviet troops to their death – they went willingly and with joy, Huzzah.

Another plus is that there  hasn’t been an overt propaganda feel good WW2 film for quite a while. Uncle Jo would be pleased. His heir, Cousin Putin, must love it.

Hair in the gate film score = D –