Stalingrad is a Russian-made, Russian/German language (with subtitles) World War II movie that’s more-or-less about the Battle of Stalingrad. I say more-or-less because, for a movie named after the city / battle, it’s almost entirely focused on a smaller battle between a nest of Russian defenders in a bombed-out apartment and the German forces across the city square. You can hear the larger battle in the background and there’s the occasional, and very rare, Big Cinematic CGI Battle Sequences, but it’s clear the budget was much smaller than it looked from the trailers so they remained focused on the micro-war story they wanted to tell instead.

So, fine, this movie isn’t the end-all-be-all Battle of Stalingrad movie writ large across a city-wide canvas. So what exactly is it? It focuses on a small band of soldiers to be the emblematic representation of the horror and futility of war (“this just in: war is bad”). These soldiers (on both sides, really) are not fighting for the mother/fatherland, they are fighting to stay alive and to protect the little beauty there is in their lives (namely, a surviving Stalingrad native girl on the Russian AND German sides). The apartment complexes they are fighting over don’t matter at all… and, no, this is not an original concept for a war movie. I’m looking at your, Hamburger Hill (just as one example).

The first half of the movie was slog and really very dull. I had little patience for what was going on – I felt the characters they introduced were shallow and poorly written, the battle scenes either overblown and silly (German soldiers counterattack literally on fire) or too small for the advertised scope of the movie and entirely too focused on this seemingly pointless battle over a pointless apartment building.

But then a curious thing happened… the movie’s somber drama started to work… the movie was given the time (it’s about 2hrs and 20 minutes long) to start to build these characters into, if not real people, at least people we could somewhat identify with or care about. And then it introduced some really gorgeous moments of sober beauty that really impressed me. There’s one quiet moment using the painter’s palette of anti-aircraft artillery that has this curious artistry – it was both the imagery, the score, and the acting that brought this movie up a number of notches in my estimation.

I’d like to note that, regardless of the merits of the story, acting, writing, and drama, the film is really good looking. I mean, it uses every gray and brown there is in the color palette. It looks like the world’s most live action version of every generic console military shooter that’s come to the market over the past five years. I am being slightly sarcastic here, sure… but I’m telling the complete truth when I say that it looks fantastic.. they spent what little budget they probably had on great set decoration and cinematography of a bombed out, ruined hell (a small bombed-out, ruined hell… but the size let them go wild with the details, I suppose). The movie was in IMAX (and 3D for no discernible reason) so that no-doubt helps (and hurts my wallet).

Another aside. For some curious reason that I haven’t figured out and may have something to do with current international feelings between Russia and Germany to which I am not aware, the movie is told using a framing device of a Russian aid worker trying to rescue a German woman from a collapsed building shortly after Japan’s recent earthquake and tsunami. The scenes shot here look great and I’m sure have some deeper meaning about former enemies working to save each other’s lives… 70 years after the war and using characters who were not alive at the time. It’s a bit of a head scratcher but, like I said, there’s probably some greater context here I’m missing.

The film never quite crawls its way out of the morass it put itself in due to the first half, but it does well enough that I can genuinely recommend the film almost despite itself. By the end, yeah, I was feeling quite down which is exactly where the film maker’s wanted me after finishing their “war is hell and grinds up men” story. The audience members I was there with (who were no-doubt well aware of the type of movie they were there to see given the limited marketing this movie got) seemed to really enjoy it (more so than I did).

Score: 80