Pretty Good

hyped garbage

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

In my opinion, this is exactly what a war movie should be. It sticks almost entirely to the facts, and even though there is a main character, the action is not glued to him. But furthermore, it all feels very comprehensive - beginning with the mobilization of the Finnish army to fend off the Soviet invasion, and ending with the armistice. The ending, while pretty brief, communicates more with a facial expression than any big final speech could. It's absolutely brilliant.Every element of war is shown or at least hinted at - the poor conditions of the front line, the morale of the troops, the bitter trench fighting, air raids, suicidal charges, sacrificial sapper destruction of tanks, etc. The tanks, uniforms, armament, AT guns, and planes all look historically accurate, and there's plenty of battles and explosions to keep even attention deficit viewers like myself awake through the 3 hour running time. Also exciting are the numerous Russian massed assaults with thousands of extras filling the screen, plus artillery blasting fleeing troops and dead bodies into the air.This is directly what inspired the Germans to make their similar violent and bleak anti-war film STALINGRAD (1993) with lesser results, which took another 5 years for Spielberg and Hollywood to digest, before we got hit with the current crop of war films from SAVING PRIVATE RYAN to THIN RED LINE, WHEN THE TRUMPETS FADE, to DAYS OF GLORY, Eastwood's IWO JIMA flicks, and "BAND OF BROTHERS". All these are done in a style which originated with this movie, the first real bloody hard-hitter of a world war 2 movie (even though the Soviet-Finnish war of '39 was not technically part of World War 2).Totally recommended to even the casual war movie fan. A semi-sequel TUNTEMATON SOTILAS (aka THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER) made in 1955, is not as good but also worth watching, and covers the continuation war which came a year and a half after the close of this film. Avoid the 1985 remake though.

This is a very nice movie about the winter war between Finnish and soviets in 1940. That is a shame to cut a lot of scenes. The quality of the DVD Belle and Blade Studios is awful. You loose a lot of important scenes, there are too true scenes which can help to understand this black period for Finland. Forget it and go to"www.suomikauppa.fi" to get the true version.I can't believe such a bad copy could exist in the country of cinema! So you have to watch Talvisota in the true long version 191 min. My vote is 10 for the film and the European version and the American short version 1!

I wanted to like this movie more than I did. True, the land battle reenactments are pretty impressive and, so far as I could tell, technically realistic. And where else can you see T-26s in action? In other areas, though, the film's low budget (relative to Hollywood) shows, especially with the Russian aircraft, which are pretty obviously radio-controlled models. Those I-16s were just too good to be true! The artillery bombardments and small arms fire are very well handled, however.More seriously, the film lacks compelling characters or much of a story. It's a pretty straightforward account of several naive young men who go to war and experience hell, but continue to fight bravely to the bitter end. To be fair, the thin plot may be a result of the severely shortened version of the movie available on DVD in the US. Original Finnish prints run 195 minutes; the DVD is 125 minutes.As it stands, the cut version of the movie will appeal primarily to military history buffs.

'Talvisota' movie is based on actual memoirs of the Winter War veterans. Finnish writer Antti Tuuri compiled these accounts for his novel 'Talvisota' and Pekka Parikka turned this book into a movie. The movie was made some years before the Soviet Union collapsed and it wasn't yet influenced by that temperament the collapse induced. That is why 'Talvisota' became extremely realistic war movie. It is not either pro-war or anti-war, it's nothing else than that how the veterans of the war experienced it.In the movie there are as much authentic equipment and uniforms seen as it was possible to get. The characters have their counterparts in reality and the personalities really help to comprehend the whole view. It's all a bloody slaughter but you will also experience pretty much of humor that many newer war films don't want to display. Yes, soldiers make pretty harsh jokes in the middle of all that fire.In stead of being a history lesson 'Talvisota' gives its own response to historical questions. Here are both patriotism and pacifism left as far out as possible. War is something that only those who have had to go through it are able to understand.