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Stalingrad, as you’d expect, is a film which looks at the famous battle which mostly took place in late 1942, during World War II, and is a Russian-made film which surprised me in managing to be even-handed in how it dealt with both sides, whereas I was initially expecting it spend little time with the German army.
On the Russian side, we have Soviet reconnaissance troops under command of Captain Gromov (Pyotr Fyodorov), who have to clear a path for a larger Soviet troops assault from across the Volga river. They set up came in a building which is also housing some civilians, including a young woman called Katya (Mariya Smolnikova, below with Pyotr Fyodorov), who’s not far off her 19th birthday.
Meanwhile, the Germans are aiming to take over the building, led by Captain Kan (Thomas Kretschmann), but while his loyalties lie with his country’s troops, his heart has fallen for Masha (Yanina Studilina, lower pic), the other young Russian woman in the building he’s intending to conquer.
I’m not familiar with any of the actors in this film, so while I was watching it, with some I was thinking, “He’s the one who looks a bit like Brad Pitt” (Thomas Kretschmann), “he’s similar to Colin Farrell” (Pyotr Fyodorov) and so on. I forget the others, but it would’ve been nice if the credits had put the actors faces to the characters’ names. And since I’m one of those people who stay for the end credits of a film, most of them were purely in Russian – so no chance of finding out who’s the Best Boy, for example – but I still enjoyed the atmospheric music and the depth of 3D between the credits and the fire raging behind them.
Before I saw Stalingrad, especially after watching the trailer, I was expecting a load of relentless action and loud explosions for most of its 131-minute running time. Now, the action that you do get is great, and the 3D is well-used, especially for the occasional ‘Sniper Elite‘-style moment, when the camera tracks a bullet or, on one occasion, a shell which is used to deflect off a static object when aiming for its target. However, there’s a hell of a lot of drama bits to get through, with the Russian soldiers practically learning Katya’s full life story and, amongst all the dust and dirt, they manage to rustle up a bath full of hot water so that Katya can celebrate turning 19 with a birthday bath, a bit like Bob Mortimer did in the penultimate episode of House of Fools.
Overall, Stalingrad is a film where, if you were watching on Blu-ray or DVD, I would recommend you skip through some of the drama segments to get to the action. Obviously, you can’t do this at the cinema but the trade-off is that you get to see the action on the big screen and it is worth a look for that. This is also the first-ever Russian film to be shot in IMAX 3D and I imagine it looks a treat on there. While the press screening wasn’t on the IMAX screen, we did see it on screen 12 at the Manchester Odeon in the Printworks, which is a satisfyingly large screen for any 2.35:1 movie.
Commercially, Stalingrad has done very well indeed. It cost approximately US$30m to make and, in its homeland, it set a new box office record for contemporary Russian films, taking $51.7m, $16.12m of which is took in its opening weekend.
Stalingrad is released on Friday February 21st and, if you’re in the North West, it can be seen in IMAX at the Manchester Printworks and the Trafford Centre.
For all other Odeon screenings around the country, check here.
PS. Fascinating fact: Thomas Kretschmann also starred in the 1993 German-made film Stalingrad.
Cert: 
Running time: 131 minutes
Year: 2013
Released: February 21st 2014
Widescreen: 2.35:1 (Redcode RAW (5K))
Rating: 5/10
Director: Fedor Bondarchuk
Producers: Sergey Melkumov, Alexander Rodnyansky, Dmitriy Rudovskiy and Steve Schklair
Screenplay: Sergey Snezhkin and Ilya Tilkin
Music: Angelo Badalamenti
Cast:
Katya: Mariya Smolnikova
Masha: Yanina Studilina
Captain Gromov: Pyotr Fyodorov
Captain Kan: Thomas Kretschmann
Sergey Astakhov: Sergey Bondarchuk
Chvanov: Dmitriy Lysenkov
Polyakov: Andrey Smolyakov
Nikiforov: Aleksey Barabash
Krasnov: Oleg Volku
Khenze: Heiner Lauterbach
Natashka: Polina Raykina
Nina: Anna von Abler
V roli navodchika: Yuriy Nazarov
Jurgens: Petar Zekavica
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.