Stalingrad – Film Review

Director Fedor Bondarchuk’s 2013 Second World War battle movie is Russia’s first feature in IMAX and 3D formats. The CGI-created battle scenes and sets are just astonishing, though there’s a problem with some of the slow-mo and stylised war footage and the soupy music accompanying it which are at odds with a realistic portrayal of the horrendous events surrounding the Battle of Stalingrad.

Astounding, and state of the art though Stalingrad is visually, it looks too much like a battle video game much of the time. Though it looks so dazzling in IMAX and 3D, it would be much better for realism if it was on a small screen and 2D. It would look more like a documentary then, and you’d trust it more.

There’s a bigger problem with the story which plays like simplistic old-style Soviet propaganda, bashing the evil and decadent Germans, while praising to the heights the plucky Russian soldiers and the heroism of ordinary Russian people. Of course, that’s its point of view, and fair enough, but it needed to tell its version of the story much more subtly, fairly and a lot more convincingly.

In that story, a small band of Russian soldiers is desperately fighting to hold a strategic apartment building in the devastated city of Stalingrad against the hugely superior might and weapons of the ruthless German army. The Russian soldiers find a plain young Russian woman living in the building, Katya (Mariya Smolnikova), who won’t leave her home, while a German officer, Kapitan Kan (Thomas Kretschmann), finds a lovely young Russian woman, Masha (Yanina Studilina), whom he falls for.

There’s a lack of substance in the story and conviction in the performances. Top-billed Smolnikova gives the weakest performance, all too arch and signalled, and Heiner Lauterbach isn’t far behind her in a caricatured performance as the German commander Khenze. Ironically, Kretschmann gives the best performance, intense but naturalistic. His romancing of a Russian woman seems to be viewed in a bad light, since both the woman and the German are seen as enemies to the Russian cause. But the two actors manage to put a subtle spin on their affair that’s missing elsewhere in the movie.

Though Stalingrad goes for epic status, it has long, intimate dialogue scenes. It is at heart a tiny personal drama, well maybe a couple of them. That’s good, but the scenes need to be stronger, with better lines and more powerful action for the actors to perform.

Seeing the Second World War from the Russian point of view is an eye-opener, and the movie’s worth checking out as an antidote to all the old American war movies on TV, which are usually just as one-sided. And of course for its amazing battle scenes.

(C) Derek Winnert 2014 derekwinnert.com