This tells the story of the epic battle that turned the tide of World War II. A band of determined Russian soldiers fight to hold a strategic building in their devastated city against a ruthless German army
Stalingrad
There's a foolish resistance towards subtitled films, so a heavy-duty IMAX offering is a bonus for world cinema action fans eager to gorge on ‘the bloodiest battle in the history of mankind’ in 1942.
The Germans are everywhere, but some Russians are embedded in a Stalingrad building where two women are a distraction.
Russian director Fydor Bondarchuk’s shoots on such a vast scale, it’s almost as if he’s somehow filmed in a real war zone with impressive lighting and brilliant camerawork.
The scene of men on fire charging towards the enemy with all guns blazing will live as long in the memory as the blindfolded ‘running through a forest’ scene in Max von Sydow’s thriller Intacto (2001).
The film opens in modern day Japan but don’t worry that you’ve got the wrong film – it’s simply to introduce the message is that ‘anything is possible’.
Which reminds me – after Empire famously gave The Pianist two stars in 2003, Roman Polanski’s film won international prizes galore!
Mysteriously, the film magazine has similarly given Stalingrad just two stars and recommends people ‘watch Call of Duty instead’, even though it is so impressively visceral it makes Monuments Men look like the pilot for Dad’s Army with the wrong cast.
From full-scale battle sequences to a blond boy standing up in a tin bath in a dark room, it’s exciting to see post-communism Russian cinema patriotically revisiting its own history like this.
I didn’t mind the clichés, because part of Stalingrad’s 131-minute charm is that in some ways it feels 40 years old.
The Russian language is lovely to hear when it’s not from the lips of a cod James Bond villain and Stalingrad’s impressively thunderous sound effects even include sheets of paper rustling through the air, too.
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