Purely Joyful Movie!

Best movie of this year hands down!

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Stalingrand of 1993 is among the many interpretations of this famous Battle of the Second World War and It is the best of them all. It has it all and it also quit accurate in portraying the fight around ,in and below the ground in the city as well as avoiding to glorify it ,but going directly to the meat of the case : The hell that it was and the suffering of the Soldiers in the front lines.As is the standard, the movie follows a platoon of German which is send to the city in order to help in the capture of the city and all of them soon release that this is not going to be walk in the park for the Soviet resistant is fierce and almost from the first minutes of combat you think "The crew doesn't waste any time , they go straight to the front lines. Awesome". The reason why I love this quick transition is that , from the title we all know what will happen and so we naturally expect to see the brutality of war and thankfully Joseph Vilsmaier ,the director, and his team also get that and their efforts are focused to make the fight intense, be accurate of the sake of the period and make the characters ,nice dudes, in order to care if they survive or die. You that feeling it is the same when you are watching Game of Thrones and we get that here ;).To focus on the accuracy of the film ,I was surprised for a lot of effort it was put in it and the costume ,the weapons and the setting is as close as it gets. For that to happen among the actors, the writers, the director's team and producers, it was also a military consultant in aid with the re-enactment. Man I like it when I see a film crew try it best to recreate a historical period and even if something goes south, you still will appreciate the final product due to the obvious effort ,which is put in it. Now as wrote before ,thet flick focuses on the struggles of a single platoon and its members, that focus works to the films favor for when you dealing with a historical subject ,is always better to start with something simple and fuse it in the era. Simply put make the story to fit the era and not the other way around. For although this film isn't a biography (so we can call a historical fiction!) the production, the story and the dialogues are made with the final goal to represent the battle of Stalingrand faithfully.Closing the film is definitely worth watching as a war film, history film and with a good amount of action, so it has the maximum appeal. And the 2013 Stalingrand is a abomination which puts shame to a fight which claim the lives of 1.5 to 2 million people.

Gritty WW2 drama.August 1942. A German combat engineer platoon is resting and recuperating in Italy after fighting in North Africa. Their Lieutenant was badly wounded in the fighting and a new, green, platoon commander, Lt Hans van Witzland, has just taken command. The platoon is soon to be attached to an elite unit and sent to a place synonymous with carnage and destruction on a massive scale. An operation that marked a turning point of World War 2. Stalingrad.A good depiction of the Battle of Stalingrad, told from the German perspective and on a small unit scale. Accurately depicts the callous disregard for human life, the terror, the sheer futility and, ultimately, foolhardiness of the Battle of Stalingrad. Quite novel too, a German telling of the battle, a battle that they suffered massive losses in, ultimately lost and, as a result, ultimately lost WW2.Not perfect. Character engagement is a bit limited - you don't feel as much for the individual soldiers as you should. There's a breathless feeling of action scene after action scene without any time to reflect, or get to know the characters better.

I have wanted to watch this film for many years but only got around to it last week. Many reviewers have highlighted the fact that this is not a Hollywood treatment, which can be a positive. But for anyone who has been exposed to the realism of Saving Private Ryan and similar movies, the absence of Hollywood production values and standards of acting and realism make Stalingrad hard to take seriously. It is highly theatrical, in the sense that the acting is over the top and the motivations and actions of most of the characters do not line up with anything that I'd call realistic, in terms of what I have read about the battle itself or based on what one would consider believable human behavior. Very simplistic in all respects. Probably would have been quite OK in 1993, when it was released, but by today's standards, not something I would recommend.

Stalingrad is not the best war film. At times, I found the sub-par acting by extras and use of stock sound effects really killed the depth of a scene. I also found that I couldn't keep a track of which characters were which, this may have been due to similar faces and language barriers creating trouble with indistinguishable accents. Between scenes, there would be such large gaps in time that you wouldn't be able to tell how a situation arose or what the situation was in some cases, making the story hard to follow. These factors limited my ability to feel the exhaustion and suffering of the characters, and left me slightly disengaged.The reason for my high mark, however, is attributed to the final scenes. The raw emotion coming from the few remaining actors is highly visible on this precious smaller scope, and the eventual plight of each character is played out in such devastating detail that I sat in silence in a dark room long after the credits had finished rolling and felt compelled after to even write some poetry.If you came to this film to see the struggle of a battle, you could do better, but stick around for the ending, it's very much worth it.