The Worst Film Ever

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

It is film where the greater political propaganda is put aside and humanity, or the destruction thereof, is put on centre stage. It is realist in that there is nothing heroic about any characters, and certainly no intention to impress anyone with action scenes. There is only depiction of the dire daily reality for those on the front line fighting- in between buildings to buildings, underground sewage system, and bunkers, the propagated cause for fatherland is replaced with confusion, disillusion, famine, death, and desperation. Soon it becomes clear that the real enemy is not those who on the other side of the front line, but the few elites that feed on the massive sacrifices of their own people. This message is delivered without making the film a strong political critique. This film provides a perspective from the defeating side, where, for those who were trapped and abandoned thousands kilometers away from home, fate was collectively decided on the day they received order to march to Stalingrad. I recommend it to people who want to have a real taste of war and are open to a different point of view.

Nearly 2am in Paris this Sunday. I've watched this movie, this morning and still cant take out of my head the views and sound. This is probably as many here say the best movie ever made on WWII.We're very far from the eternal Hollywoodian productions, with more or less happy endings, carefully edited not to shock ears or eyes with crude words or views. Joseph Vilsmaier goes straight to the facts. Even if the beginning with its views of the beaches of Italy gives an impression of gradation to the subject, we're very quickly confronted to the reality of what was to happen: young guys who would prefer to be attending their everyday life with families and friends and brought into a storm by a megalomaniac scoundrel named Hitler.The best example of this is the huge lie of the general in the scene at the beginning of the film when he states that Germany has been victorious at El Alamein!All along the movie, we can feel the sense of betrayal of the battalion and Hans. It's a huge crescendo just as the horrors of the situations lived by those men increases. Another aspect of the way the film is shot, is at the same time a terrible sense of loneliness. Progressively each character transmits to the audience this terrible feeling of being abandoned to fate and elements i.e. the climate. The director and the writer have made a fantastic analysis of the human nature and its reaction to this terrible trauma. And you cant help thinking, how would I react in such circumstances?.Joseph Vilsmaier has succeeded not to drop in the great mistake of Jean-Jacques Annaud's version of Stalingrad (Enemy at the gate) which is the relative happy ending. Whatever the facts you depict in a movie treating of this battle, there cant be a positive or happy ending for any of the protagonists. A simple figure attests of it: it is estimated that of the 100000 German POW only 5000 survived and returned to their country.This is a great movie, and each adolescent should view it to keep in its memory what the so called superiority of a nation can be driven to if by nationalistic propaganda it is driven to expansionism.This is true on any continent, whether America, Europe or Asia. History repeats itself whether we like it or not and there is always somewhere a mad man to exploit economic circumstances leading to such horrors. France and England have had a huge responsibility in the arrival of Hitler because of the stupid Versailles treaty and the way we ruined the German economy opening the gates to hatred on one side and credulity of a starving nation to the propaganda and lies of its filthy new leader in the 30s.

It is a great portrayal of battle for Stalingrad. As I write this Stalingrad now known as Volgograd is attacked again, by new enemy, Al Qayida from East Caucases.There is nothing better to portray this battle then scenes from this film. It is funny, that fountain with people dancing is still a center of Volgograd, and the battle was fought around it.What in the hell made Hitler send his armies that far away? I guess the crazy idea was to join with advancing Japanese armies somewhere in India. Idiotic and crazy! Just as Hitler was. Idiotic and crazy! If he every took a train from Berlin to Moscow he would never thought about advancing towards the East that far. I know Lebensraum and all, but it was crazy!

The movie has a lot of good points, as have been shown in other review.However, the battle scenes in this movie are a little bit silly in my eyes: 1. At the beginning battle of the movie, the storm company (or battalion?) was tasked to overwhelm the defenders of the factory. The captain wanted to close the quarter quietly and launch the offensive without rousing the defenders. Yet, a rifle was fired unwillingly by an infantry who jumped in, which waked up the defenders and caused a lot of casualties in the attacking force. Later, the captain gave the soldier a hand-grenade to eliminate the machine-gun which is mowing down the German soldiers. That soldier just ran toward the machine-gun without much dodging movements, not even lowering his body. And he didn't get mowed down by the machine-gun.This contradicted the usual common sense. What's more, the German hand-grenade's advantage is its throwing distance, but the explosive in it is not as much as the U.S. fragmentation ones. So I am quite doubtful that a potato-masher would destroy a machine-gun pillbox, as shown in the movie. Plus, Stalingrad would not have gained its nickname "Street-fight Academy" if the defender's position is so easy to overthrow. In the ruins of the Stalingrad, it is impossible to imagine such a single machine-gun pillbox without supporting cross-fire from other directions. If it were that simple, the 6th Army would have captured the city long before the winter began.2. In the middle of the movie, over the snow-covered steppe, Lieutenant Witzland's platoon is ordered to hold an area where the Russian wanted to break in with their tanks. The soldiers either used Panzerfaust to give the tank a direct hit, or waited in the foxhole until the tank rolled over, and attached the ad-hoc high-explosive to its rear-engine part to break it down. After that, the infantry soldiers attached to the tank or behind it were mowed down by German MP40 or MG42.As far as I know, the usual way of fighting with a mixed mechanized formation is to let the infantry soldiers come forward to scout the hidden enemy fire positions, to expose them and let them be licked up by the up-coming tanks. No, the tanks would never thrust forward by themselves. That way, they would be easy targets for Panzerfausts or Bazookas. The tanks would go all by themselves only in very large formations, say, a tank division or a tank army. In that case, the enemy would not have a chance to come behind the leading tanks and explode them from behind - anyone who tried to do this would be mowed down by the machine-gun in the following-up tanks.In short, the movie is successful in humanizing the German soldiers fighting in Stalingrad, but it made a big mistake in over-simplifying the battle scenes and under-estimating the Russian force too much, just the same errors commit by the Fuhrer and General Staff of Wehrmacht.The Russian would not have won the Battle of Stalingrad if they fought in the way described in the movie.