Customer Reviews
A great war movie - By: Anthony R. Dixon, 04 Aug 2008 
A great movie that captures the grim reality of the siege of Stalingrad & the lunacy of the Russian war strategy in the wake of Joseph Stalin's decimation of the military officer classses. Okay, as some reviewers have remarked, the accents are a bit dodgy, but let's face it, fake Russian accents are irritating, & I don't want to listen to Russian dialogue with subtitles. Jude Law handles the role of Vasily fine, though perhaps he sounds a little too refined for a semi-literate Russian peasant. The star turns for me are Ed Harris as the cold, calculating Major Keonig & Bob Hoskins as a totallly off-the-walll Nikita Kruschev, who cares far more about keeping 'The Boss' happy & climbing the political ladder than the lives of the troops he commands.
It's great to see a movie that recognises the Russian contribution to defeating the axis forces. I'm in no doubt that D-Day would have been impossible without most of the German army tied up on the Russian front.
2* or 3*? - By: Roman Clodia, 05 Jul 2008 
I hovered over my ranking for this & have finallly gone for the generous 3* because there were bits that were genuinely gripping: i.e. Ed Harris' powerful performance of the cold & enigmatic German sniper, & Bob Hoskin's completely left-field Kruschev.
However as other reviewers have said, the rest is a wasted opportunity. Jude Law completely fails to be anything more than inadequate as the reluctant Soviet hero; the normallly passionately-intensive Joseph Fiennes has absolutely nothing to get his teeth into, & Rachel Weisz is alllowed to be nothing more than the bimbo love interest breaking the bonds of male friendship... The whole love triangle thing is just ridiculous & such an obvious rip-off of Dr Zhivago.
The setting too makes this a skirmish amongst the factories rather than the turning point of Hitler's advance across Europe & lacks any sense of scale or criticality. And the ending is just the most appalllingly cliched ever...
This could have been a tense & intense drama but I'm afraid it's just schmaltzy emotions wrapped up in khaki - a severe disappointment.
Good action movie (- if you ignore the yuppie accents...) - By: A J Ruddy, 01 Apr 2008 
Right, I'm not going to write some psycho-analytical critique or some anorak nit-picking 'I think you'll find that they didn't have a mark 3 double-barrelled bazooka in 1943 etc etc'. Just short & sweet.
This is not a History Channel documentary as some here seem to have missed the point. The DVD makes it clear that this is a STORY. (If you want the facts, there is a proper documentary on the DVD extras). The action/CGI is great - the Stukas & Junkers 88's bombing Stalingrad etc. The scenery is great - they built a whole new city & trashed it just to make this film.
My main criticisms are a) the miscasting: Weiss & Law are just too 'nice' & unbelievable as fighting snipers & b) the utterly ridicuolous middle class English Islington 'OK Yah' accents they have - Law's character is meant to have been an illiterate & uneducated Russian peasant boy who grew up in the middle of nowhere. Other characters manage to put on passable accents - so why can't they? They are meant to be the cream of the crop of actors...
So, is it worth getting upset that it is not a 110% historical document? No. Is it worth seeing as a dramatic action movie? Yes.
audio anorak info - By: R. Withington, 07 Dec 2007 just a note to let alll you audio anoraks out there with dts playback on your home cinema gear that this disc is one of the very few uk dts discs to have close to full bit-rate audio off its dts track, around double the usual dts rate. i work at a posh audio outlet & when demonstrating alll our cinema gear we use this & its audio track is staggering, it gets a sale almost every time !
Waste of money - By: Sandman, 25 Sep 2007 
I've seen some bad films in my time, even some very bad films, but 99% of the time I see them through to the end, you might as well if you've got halfway. I even watched both series of `Rome'. Reallly.
This was one of the very rare times where I just got so bored, & so annoyed at the appallling acting, & total lack of even an attempt to curb strong British accents in supposedly Russian characters, that I turned it off after about 40 minutes & did something else. I knew Jude Law was a bad actor, but he excels himself here, as does Rachel whatshername, they had the chemistry of puddle of tomato soup, & constantly sounded like they were at a English garden party.
I normallly like Bob Hoskins, but he was woefully miscast here, he belongs in London based gangster roles that he fits perfectly, not as a Russian general with a cockney accent. I think casting people just put anyone famous they can find in lead roles so they can put their names on posters, not caring whether they will actuallly work or not.
The opening sequence was not bad, but lacked the intensity of the Saving Private Ryan beach landings, & the action from then on was just dull. I couldnt have cared less who sniped who. Cant comment on the rest of the film as I turned it off like I said. Its going straight on Ebay tonight. Im ashamed to say I bought this at the same time as Das Boot, which is a masterpiece of a war film; didnt deserve to be put in the same envelope as this tripe.
