I just watched this movie and I must say that I wasn’t very impressed. The story seemed to jump around too much. They also stuck a romance in thier for no reason, like they do in almost every war movie.
The thing that bugged me the most was how they left out big pieces of the story. 2 different times Vassili was pinned down by Konig and after a couple of shots, they would just show him magically back at the home base. Like when him and his buddy jumped that gap in that building when Konig was waiting for him to show up. Then BOOM he shoots his buddy. Next thing you know, he is back in the arms of his officer pal and his girl friend. How did he escape from the building? How did he get back? They did the same thing when he was in the factory pinned down. He shot Konig in the hand and then all of the sudden he was back in the homebase!
Ignore this film, you want an nice realistic gritty view of the battle with actual Germans and Russians as opposed to British Russians and America Germans See “Stalingrad”
I had the same problem with this film that I have with the new “Titantic”, “Pearl Harbor”, et al. That is, Hollywood takes a real life event, full of human suffering, interesting stories, and real characters–and inserts a lame, 2-D love story between fictional characters.
I mean, WTF?!? The real story wasn’t interesting enough that you had to give us schmaltz instead?
Now, “Apollo 13”, there’s a good “based on real events” movie. I especially love it because you can spot the fictional moments, due to the way they ring false. Example–the astronauts sniping at each other in the capsule after the explosion. It never happened; Lovell relates in his book “Lost Moon” that the crew was professional at all times.
The characters were not fictional, and they didn’t “Stick” the romance in. It really did happen more or less the way they protrayed it in the movie; Vasily Zatsiaev (sp?) really was the numero uno ace sniper in Stalingrad, and he really did fall in love with a female sniper named Tatyana Chernova, although I doubt they were as good looking as Jude Law and Rachel Weisz. They were lovers and were separated when she was injured. So it’s not fiction at all; it’s a true story.
Where the movie strayed from the truth was in them being reunited. Actually, both survived the war, but thought the other was dead, and didn’t find out about it until years later.
There’s also some question as to whether or not Konig was a real guy or a compilation of many snipers sent after Zatsaiev, who the Germans desperately wanted to kill but never could. He ended up killing at least 150-200 German soldiers. His girlfriend Chernova was credited with over 80 kills.
According to the book it was based on (War of the Rats, now titled “Enemy at the Gates”) there was, but the existance of Konig is based on Zaitsev’s account of events. The duel was never as desperate as they make it seem, however. Zaitsev had stalked my snipers and Konig was just another target, albeit a politicall important one.
SPOILERS!
Interestingly, the death of the politcal officer is not very different than from the film. Although it was less a suicide and more a stupid guy in the front lines. Rather than looking up to get killed and point out Konig’s position, it was a case of him looking up to say “hey look I see him! I’ll point him out out to you!” BLAM thud.
A 1.6:1 size advantage for the Soviets may have been true at the start of Operation Barbarosa, but that quickly changed. The Germans had 10,000,000 soldiers during the war. The Soviets had 20,000,000 men in uniform. The Germans at the time were fighting on the Soviet front and in North Africa, had to keep the occupied lands in line, and had to defend against possible invasion. The Russians were fighting a 1-front war and could put almost all of their forces up against the Germans. At the start of hostilities their main resource was manpower, which they made use of in ways hard to understand by the West. They traded lives for time in defense of their land.
For comparison: Of 10,000,000 soldiers the German’s lost 3,300,000 (33%) killed/missing. Of 20,000,000 Soviet soldiers there were 13,600,000 (68%) killed/missing (including 1,500,000 dying in (or on the way to) POW camps and 500,000 executed by the Germans).
(Numbers came from World War II Almanac by Robert Goralski)
One thing I didn’t get was: In one scene they show the political officer denouncing Zeitzev as a traitor. Then, they never show any consequences to this?
I got the sense the movie was really over-edited; I think they shot about four hours of film and pared it down to just over two hours. There were other big editing/writing holes.
The movie was okay, but it really had a lot of amateurish bits. The editing was poor, the battle scenes often descebded into silliness, a lot of details were just quirky - why did the snipers hit EVERY person they were shooting at right in the forehead?
I quite enjoyed the movie – it was nice to see a WWII movie that didn’t have Yanks in it. Although if Hollywood can get them into a Colditz remake I wouldn’t have been completely surprised to see them at Stalingrad.
I mentioned the movie to a Russian co-worker of mine and asked what he knew of it / what he’d learned growing up… his take on it was that some parts were true, as he said: “there was a war… and there were snipers… the rest is Hollywood”.
I borrowed the DVD from the library, and was really into the film until the disc just flaked out and wouldn’t work anymore. So I never saw the ending of it.
But I have to say this - Jude Law is a 10 (check out the cover of the current GQ ) and Joseph Fiennes isn’t far behind that.
So much for my interest in the historical aspect of the film.
Some of the sniper shots were way to good to be true (ie no sniper is truly that good). Like that time the german guy snipes a russian jumping accross the building. Its one thing to hit a moving target, its another to do it without tracking his motion at all.
The movie engaged in all this lame moralizing about communism, it was stupid.
I’ve never read the book, (but still plan to) but I liked the movie a great deal.
I found it very easy to follow and was never confused about the action in the film.
I too didn’t like the lame moralizing about communism and I think that was the main drawback to the film. Also I don’t think Jude Law did a very good job of playing ‘uneducated’. He hardly seemed like the kind of guy who needed help spelling simple words. Also not enought of Rachel Weisz naked. But then again most movies have that flaw.
I liked it up until the final showdown, which abandons the basic methodology of the first several encounters between the two snipers. A movie about snipers shouldn’t turn into High Noon at the end with both snipers abandoning their methods and walking around in the open.
…Most of the movie (all about Zietsev and Koenig, Danilov meeting Kruschev and instilling morale, the boy spy) comprises maybe 5 pages in the book. 10 tops. The sniper duel itself is just briefly mentioned - you really have to search for it, then you’re like, “They got a movie outta that?!” Read it, really - the book’s incredible.
I thought it was going to be dry and I was sure I woudn’t remember the (rather large) cast of characters, and so, wouldn’t care about them. Just the opposite. It’s amazing the feel you get for the strategies they put together and the million German soldiers stranded by a Hitler that didn’t care. The loss, the human toll, the grimness - wow. An outstanding read and much better than the movie.
Although I did enjoy Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes. Yow!
Snicks
Although if Hollywood can get them into a Colditz remake I wouldn’t have been completely surprised to see them at Stalingrad.