Russia has always been famous for artistic works of propaganda, the spirit of which is alive and well in director Fyodor Bondarchuk’s flag-waving war film, Stalingrad. Ideologically, Bondarchuk’s film may extol the virtues of Mother Russia and her courageous sons but artistically, Stalingrad is more influenced by Hollywood artificiality than Soviet kitsch.
The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the most prolonged and bloody conflicts in military history as the German and Russian armies found themselves in a deadlock for control of the city. The film takes place in the city as a small group of Russian soldiers attempt to keep control of an apartment building that stands as a last blockade to the progress of the German army, while also trying to protect a teenage girl still living in the building.
Stalingrad is the first Russian film to be made using IMAX 3D technology and Bondarchuk and his Director of Photography Maxim Osadchiy have gone to town with this technology in the manner of a child with a new toy. The environments are certainly striking, but they have an artificiality pitched somewhere between Zac Snyder’s glossy hyper-reality and the giddy thrill of combat based computer games. Add into the mix a preposterous amount of slow-motion and the finished result is a film whose visual histrionics kill off any potential for emotional engagement. At times it even spills over into the preposterous, as soldiers engage in combat that more closely resembles the balletic violence of The Matrix than a squalid, ramshackle fight for survival.
While layers of gloss were added to the visual presentation, not much work was done on the storyline, which suffers from a lack of depth and imagination and ultimately boils down to a half-hearted love story between the five soldiers and their teenage ward. The characterisation of this band of brothers is so flimsy that it is often difficult to tell one from the other, rather undermining the bizarre framing device in which a German medic tells the story of his five heroic fathers to a young woman trapped in the wreckage following the Fukushima earthquake in 2011.
Although it has done staggering business in its home country, I found Stalingrad utterly bizarre yet incredibly tedious to watch – which is, I suppose, a kind of dubious achievement for its director but is by no means a recommendation for any potential viewer.