Stalingrad the Movie

We just got done watching Stalingrad, a German movie about German Wehrmacht soldiers fighting in, sorta obviously, Stalingrad.

It was pretty heavy. We've had it for a couple of weeks now and didn't watch it because, y'know, it's a two and a half hour long movie that we knew would be relentlessly cheerless. And, over all, that's precisely what we got. It is the story of a crack unit of German fighting men who are sent to the bloodiest battle in human history, and on the losing side, at that. The movie had performances that ranged from the pretty good to outstanding, great cinematography, score and, of course, a deeply compelling source.

Pretty clearly, the point of the film was the relentless futility and stupidity of war. The battle scenes focused far less on the heroism of characters and a bit more on the psychological collapse of people put into that kind of meat grinding.

This is in some contradistinction to, say, something like Saving Private Ryan, a movie I couldn't really enjoy without being able to say why. Saving Private Ryan, despite the supposed realism of the battle scenes, has very little in the way to say about the psychological collapse of those who fight wars. The characters are all brave and heroic, and even at the end when Tom Hanks' character dies it's bravely (tho' I thought it came off more inane than brave) firing his pistol at a tank in some pathetic last desperate act of defiance. (I, personally, might have thought to get out of the tank's way, but I guess I'm silly like that.)

Stalingrad has brave people in it, but the battle scenes are far more about the multifaceted psychological harm that happens. Some of the scenes verge on the harrowing, but not necessarily the ones where peoples limbs or blown off or whatever. I mean, we've seen that kind of stuff since Platoon, right? One of the scenes with a group of desperate and hardened soldiers dealing with a bound Russian woman had a great deal of emotional impact, because of the casual assumption of brutality acceptable by soldiers in that situation - they just assume they're going to gang rape her in order of rank, and the psychological convolutions of the lieutenant, then the highest rank officer, when first trying to psyche himself up to rape her and then deciding not to do it was intense. And then, well, it's Stalingrad, so you've got to have people dying in the snow - the scene was both poignant and intensely beautiful. (Also, reminds me why I'm so happy to live in California. Yay mild winters!)

The movie's biggest flaw was . . . the lieutenant of this unit of soliders, and several of the people under his command, would confront German officers who were more traditionally Nazi, pompous, murderous and glory hounds. While absent the context of Nazi German's genocide against the Russian people - around thirty million Russians were killed, most of this civilians - I understand that the movie was trying to build sympathy for the characters. And it is certainly true that the people in the German Army, most of them, weren't genocidal monsters, but confused people living in a tyrannical regime that had mastered the arts or propaganda. But the context of the German invasion of Russia can't easily be ignored. So sometimes when the protagonists stand up to their brutal high ranking officers it comes off as being an apologia for the rank-and-file German soldier.

Mind you, I understand I say that in the context of American movies doing the same thing. I mentioned Platoon, earlier. Isn't Platoon an attempt to exonerate the rank-and-file American soldiery of the atrocities committed in Southeast Asia? I think clearly so. It shows the "average" American soldier as someone caught up in events outside of their control, doing atrocities under duress from their superiors. It ignores that each and ever drafted soldier was considered a legal and moral adult. So I can't hold that against Stalingrad too much, right?

Overall, I liked the movie a great deal. All of my favorite war movies - Apocalpyse Now, Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket - are about the stupidity and futility of war, and Stalingrad fits into that pack pretty darn well. It's a grim story, but a very good movie.