The film 2013 film Stalingrad directed by Fedor Bondarchuk
is a Russian film about the famed battle in the titular Soviet Union city. The action-packed war movie is the highest
grossing Russian film ever produced and was filmed in IMAX 3D. The film follows a group of Russian soldiers
in World War II who defend a strategic building in the city. In the process, two Russian civilian women fall
in love in the midst of the battle – one with a Russian soldier, the other with
a German soldier. With this effort, Bondarchuk set out to make
an emotionally resonant film about the brutal realities of war, while
concurrently providing exciting action scenes to engage the audience. Although visually appealing at times, the
film fails in so many other regards that it ultimately leads to the
construction of something hollow and lifeless.
The story is really the film’s
first and greatest failure. The narrative is
convoluted at best, with no clear protagonist, which leaves a lot to be desired. Adding to that is the fact that the film is
all told through flashback and the film is bookended by scenes from present
time of a relief worker who recounts the story of his mother’s time spent in
the war before he was born. This serves as the most
unnecessary plot device and unnecessarily complicates the narrative. The film may have been better served if it
lived and died all in the same time period, keeping it more contained and less
muddled. Take a bad story and fill it with flat,
uninteresting characters and you have a recipe for a great film.
Wait, that’s actually a recipe for
a terrible film, which this is. The characters are all
one-dimensional, and because there is no one obvious protagonist it becomes
hard to root for anyone in this two hour and ten minute tale. One could argue that the female leads were
the most interesting characters, but the audience learns very little about them
and they are hardly sympathetic. Great war films give
insight into the lives of the characters outside the war and how the constant
stresses of battle have affected who they once were. In Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998)
for example, the audience learns multiple sides to every character throughout
the film – who they were before the war, who they are now, and that is what
makes an audience care for them. The only example of a
character with any real backstory is the musician who plays a birthday song for
the female lead near the end of the film. In
large part, however, this film alienated its characters by giving them no
context, and in the process alienates its audience as well. This is a problem that bleeds into the rest
of the film and makes other aspects flounder as well, such as the action.
Action simply does not work if the
audience does not care about the characters. Take a great action movie such as Iron Man (Favreau, 2008). Tony Stark is rude, arrogant, and egotistical,
but he is also charming, charismatic, and likable. When
he’s in danger, the audience is on the edge of their seats because they care
about Tony and don’t want him to get hurt. If
the audience does not care about the characters it makes no difference if they
live or die onscreen. This is most notable in Stalingrad in the scene where the blonde lead is shot in the head
near the end. There was not even a hiccup of emotion
because she was unsympathetic and the audience knew nothing about her. Not only was the
action unengaging emotionally, it was also poorly executed.
The action is all shot in such a
way that it feels like a bastardized version of an American action film. The over-cranked footage mixed with
under-cranked footage using a Steadicam to circle around blood spews and
explosions felt like a badly imitated Zack Snyder or Michael Bay action scene. On an even smaller level, there were just a
lot of missed punches and reactions that are only exacerbated by the slow
motion and take the audience out of the film each time it happens. The movie is undoubtedly intended to be a
spectacle, shot in IMAX 3D, but comes across instead feeling like a B-movie
ripping off the style of great American action directors.
The action is stylized and exaggerated to the point of exhaustion,
climaxing with a scene so ridiculous the audience laughed. This of course was when the Soviet Union soldiers
intentionally shoot a missile at a disabled tank so that it ricochets around a
corner to kill enemy troops.
This is not to say there were
absolutely no redeeming qualities of the film. The
cinematography was beautiful at times and the production design was really
striking. The film used a nice color palette of cool
blues and warm yellows and oranges. These colors work
together in a way that is not just cinematic but also symbolic of the harsh
juxtaposition of a love story in the midst of a brutal war and one of the
bloodiest battles in human history. The camera movement and
lighting all worked seamlessly in the slower, emotional dialogue scenes to a
level that the action scenes could never achieve.
Similarly the production design was detailed and always felt authentic. This was especially notable in all the
exterior scenes in the streets, where the filmmakers undoubtedly used sound
stages but the production design was so seamless that one could not tell the
difference. For a film that cost only 30 million
(Boxofficemojo.com),
the set design and execution is an extremely impressive feat considering the
amount of [bad] action and visual effects the film had, which will typically
suck up a production budget of that size with ease. That
being said, there were still a few missteps in the cinematography and
production design departments. There was an excessive
use of day for night photography at the beginning of the film, which looks strange
to the average viewer and completely takes an experienced viewer out of the
scene. It was used mostly at the beginning of the
film when the boats full of soldiers are arriving on shore. This is most likely because it is extremely
difficult to organize such grand scale films on location with that many moving
parts is extremely difficult to do in the dark.
Also, it seemed as if the soldiers’ costumes had just been pressed, even
at the end of the film. Their faces were black with dirt and oil, but
even in the final scenes the soldiers were wearing suits that look as if they
had just come from the dry cleaners (because they probably had).
In all this film was a grand
misstep for director Fedor Bondarchuk, and for Russian cinema as a whole. The film failed on so many levels that it is
difficult to say what the film did right.
While the cinematography and production design were on par with a
typical American film, other aspects floundered. The
screenplay was one of utter confusion that was unnecessary and did not point to
any clear protagonist. Because there was no protagonist and all the
characters were uninteresting and one-dimensional, the rest of the film
suffered and especially the action. Given that this is an
action film from another country, one would expect them to do things
differently or approach the material in a different manner. Instead Bondarchuk
chose to imitate an American style, but with much less poise. Despite all this the film still managed to
make more than any other Russian produced film in history, although that would
not make it the first terrible film to make money – ask Bondarchuk’s role model
Michael Bay.
