Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Finally a WW2 movie from a German perspective without depicting the Germans as brainless monsters. The story and motivations of the characters are very close to reality. Very captive and emotional. And of course a very lovely cast.

I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy this German miniseries about five young friends caught up in World War II. I actually enjoyed every moment. A lot! It has tender love scenes, explosive battle scenes, heart stopping suspense, agonizing cliff hangers, and a poignant mood of youthful loss and nostalgia that feels very appealing and (to an American viewer) feels like it came right out of St. Elmo's Fire. You can't help but love the five friends in this movie. Miriam Stein as Charlotte ("Charly" to her friends) is so sensationally alive on screen. She has the glowing, girl-next-door wholesome sex appeal that American movie actresses lost decades ago. Yet at the same time, she fully plays the dark side of her character, showing how Charlotte is hardened by the war and how she does terrible things as a combat nurse on the Eastern front. Tom Schiller is just as brilliant as Friedhelm, the young dreamer who goes from being a poetically cynical critic of the war to a brutally effective combat soldier. At first I hated the way the script presented him as a victim, but as the story progresses the character surprises you, becoming exactly what he hates and yet still retaining his understanding of why the war is wrong. And Tom Schiller never fails to be convincing at every point along the way. Now I agree with many of the criticisms of this movie. The idea that "the war" brutalized these wholesome kids totally ignores the fact that Nazi Germany was a brutal place before the war ever began. The daily violence on the streets is never shown, nor do we see the Hitler Youth or the Brown Shirts in action. We never see the failures of the older generation who voted Hitler into power in the first place. The anti-Semitism of the Poles is played up, while the anti-Semitism of the Germans is discreetly muted. Interestingly, the roots of European anti-Semtism in the teachings of the Catholic Church (i.e. the Jews betrayed Christ) are deliberately ignored as well. Anti-Semitism is just presented as a side effect of the war and not the cause of everything the Nazis sought to accomplish. In the end, the producers of this movie weren't really trying to create a movie like DOWNFALL or SCHINDLER'S LIST. What they really were after was to create a lost-youth nostalgia epic like ST. ELMO'S FIRE. And the disturbing thing is, they succeeded. In fact someone should do a "trailer" for GENERATION WAR featuring the song "Man In Motion (Theme From St. Elmo's Fire)" by John Parr. Everything fits perfectly, right down to the lyrics!"I can make it/I know I can/You broke the boy in me/But you won't break the man!"

I felt like someone had to add some good things here. The Nazi regime was pure evil. But unfortunately the Wehrmacht regular army was manned with people like you and me. They were led to believe they will win and that they are the greatest people on the face of the earth. Tell me about someone who won't fell to that illusion at least for a short time. Basically they were kids in their 18 till 30 which were mislead. But I can tell you a story about Wehrmacht. My wife's grandma which was an opera singer recounts every time that German Wehrmacht soldiers were always giving the kids candy and nurturing them because they also had kids at their home in Germany. While when Russians entered their village all kids ran away and hide. She even tells me that Russians did cook a chicken from their backyard with feathers. Her older sister (was 14) had to hide for as long as 2 weeks until the Russian army moved. You can understand why. So let's be fair. Wehrmacht was the regular army composed of regular people and the SS "c&ocks1ckers" were another story.

It is complicated for Germany, who was the main (but not at all single) inducer of World War II, to make something depicting that era as several like-minded and pressure groups from the "allied" side find immediately something worth criticism. On the other hand, German environment, characters and language provide so much additional value, that I prefer watching films and series on related issues this way - unless it is blunt defensive propaganda...But Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter is definitely not the latter; it is a sad and dramatic story about deprived illusions and opportunities, without clear assessments provided, thus letting the viewers ponder on and over painful and serious issues. The budget was apparently big, allowing to create realistic wartime/battle scenes and employ versatile actors from different generations (particularly Tom Schilling as Friedhelm Winter, Ludwig Trepte as Viktor Goldstein, Sylvester Groth as Sturmbannführer/Standartenführer Hiemer). True, not all scenes are of the same value and necessity, and the final scene seemed a bit odd, constructed, but the overall plot is mostly smooth and plausible. In my opinion, one should avoid to create something where losers are bad by definition and winners are always good (e.g., after WW II, the Soviets used several Nazi concentration camps for their own political prisoners, commissars of Jewish and East- European origin committed many atrocities while enforcing socialism, etc.). Before getting steamed up about something, one should learn its circumstances from different sources.