Chunyi Hsu 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.

SnoopyStyle It's August 1942 and some German soldiers are resting in Porto Cervo, Italy after battling in North Africa. Lieutenant Hans von Witzland is their new by-the-book commander. The men are soon sent to the eastern front. It's a harrowing fight filled with horrors as they get surrounded by the Russians.It is a little bit hard to differentiate some of the men. Most have similar haircuts and some look very similar. It's also hard to differentiate by their voices since I don't understand German. I certainly don't recognize any of the actors. Once they get into the battle gears, it's nearly impossible.The battle sets are big. The rubble is impressive. However there is something old fashion about some of this. It doesn't have the feel of reality. There are too many wildly overacting "shocking" cliché moments. Everybody is yelling. The action is also not the best choreographed. It is still impressive that they actually stage them. Overall there are some good gritty bloody stuff going on but it gets undercut by a lot of clichés.

fung0 It's hard to deny this is an excellent film. Impeccable acting, direction and photography create a powerful depiction of war at its most miserable, futile and degrading.But I do think two mild criticisms need to be stated.First, a movie titled "Stalingrad" ought to present at least some vague overview of that historical battle. Aside from a few confusing references to the wider tactical situation, this move sticks to a worms-eye view. After a while, you even have to wonder whether the travails of this particular group of soldiers are at all typical of the huge German force involved at the time. The film works as drama, but if you call it simply "Stalingrad," I think you're promising a bit of historical context.Second, the pace is a tiny bit over-drawn. In the last third of the film, I reached an atrocity overload, where further horrors had progressively less impact. I began to disconnect from the characters, remaining only mildly curious as to what agonizingly tragic ways would be found to dispatch them. A stronger dramatic hook is needed, to pull us through the admitted hopelessness of this last segment.These are far from fatal flaws. It's more a question of balance. A bit more context, a slightly tighter narrative, and this could have been a masterpiece. As it is, I'd say it's a really excellent film, that does show - unforgettably - how war deadens the soul, even if it fails to kill the body.Still, I have to hope that other filmmakers will one day present a broader view of the battle of Stalingrad. There's still lots of historical ground that needs to be covered, if future generations are to understand the madness that created this nightmarish conflict.

Qiang Xu 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.