Stalingrad (2003)

Before we had films like Saving Private Ryan, Stallingrad is widely seen as one of the most graphic wartime dramas ever made, But the amount of raw graphic battlefield carnage might have won it awards at the time, but for a lot of people it put them off because it was classified as a horror film. But if you overlook the "horror" factor and accept it for what it is then its a really great film. It still remains one of my favourite beach war dramas. You also have to take into account that when the film was made the production team were very much anti nazi. Their are no heros in this film, just soldiers ordered to defend their country fight the enemy and most of all forbidden to retreat.

Absolutely without a doubt this German 3-part documentary is a 10. But be FOREWARNED ... simply listening to the German 6th Army and Red Army survivors (about 80 years old in 2003) and a few citizen survivors of Stalingrad is both very upsetting and heart wrenching. But there are a lot of both pictures and film, too. By the last 2 months of this 5+ month battle (from late August 1942 to February 1943), the conditions inside Stalingrad were devastating, horrific. Incredible cold, which began in late November, lack of food and any kind of warm shelter, hopeless military situation for the Germans. Even people eating horse meat and later on dogs and even cats and at very end parts of dead PEOPLE!!!And the UTTER stupidity of Hitler. He could have and should have given permission to his generals to withdraw the 6th Army by no later than December 1942, thus saving much of the men and equipment of the 300,000 man army that first attacked in August 1943. But he ended up sacrificing practically the entire army and IMHO sealed the defeat of his nation. From that point on the Soviets were on the offensive and the Nazis were retreating.

This is a conventional and limited treatment of an extraordinary subject. It is conventional in its use of film and is limited to the suffering caused by war. It is a film that deals with a battle only in a broad and almost incidental sense: Suffering is the exhaustive theme.One film would have been adequate to see alternately survivors sat in artfully dimmed spaces emotionally and repetitively recounting suffering and footage of people on the move or killed. To make the point and lather it home we get the clichéd Volga vistas and stirring orchestral music, too.Film should be employed innovatively (or not) to match the subject - be it suffering or the account of a siege and urban warfare. These films deal with the former blandly and little with the latter. If we are not to become inured to suffering then director's please rise to the occasion.

First, I'll just get a few short comings of this work out of the way.(a) It helps if you know something about the battle before watching this documentary. You -might- feel a little lost in the bigger-picture sense without such knowledge.(b) Those looking for an in-depth military analysis of the battle should look elsewhere. This film is brilliant in its ability to capture the experience of war, not the theory behind it. Hence, there are not a lot of maps, etc. in this movie.(c) Sometimes the film can be a but redundant.So, now that all of that is out of the way, on to the good stuff. What really makes this film shine is the first-person accounts by people who were actually there, and lived through it. Both ex-German and Russian soldiers are interviewed, along with Russian civilians. It is said that a soldier only really experiences war in the 1000 feet that is around him. If that is true, then this film is a horrifying, moving, and amazing account of those 1000 feet. It also abuts the historical-drama movie by the same name. The two are really worth watching in tandem. This is a bottom-up account of Stalingrad that illuminates the experiences of the common foot soldier, which is often a story not heard from the German side of things. I really feel this is "must see" for anyone with even a remote interest in WWII.