Presumably you were at the liquidation of a Byelorussian village in 1943 and know the truth of how it went down?
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sophiavladimirovna — 15 years ago(September 20, 2010 12:28 PM)
I'm a woman and this is the finest war film I have ever seen. Well, I am Russian, and I have been brought up in reverent terror of WW2, but still, ladies, wake the hell up! Pearl Harbour is a lie made by the government to control you.
Pretty please, with a cherry on top, clean the beep car. -
DaveHedgehog — 15 years ago(October 27, 2010 08:58 AM)
I'm 19 and female. I didn't like it because it was boring. I generally like war movies and I also generally like 'disturbing' movies. I didn't find it disturbing it all. It was just stupid. Although, I did like the barn scene.
But I should also note that my favourite genres are sci-fi and horror and that probably strips me of any credibility regarding movies such as these
I just blue myself. -
aliza_tvito — 15 years ago(November 04, 2010 07:48 AM)
///I'm not really sure how to explain it.///
Guess you are just overfed with a blockbusters.
Well, it's only the movie, but it's based on that what was
really
happened. Wake up, you're 19 and mature enough.
Thank God, I'm an Atheist! - Luis Bunuel -
DaveHedgehog — 15 years ago(November 05, 2010 09:54 AM)
WTF? I hate blockbusters, why do you think I was watching this movie in the first place?
I meant that I wasn't sure how to explain my feelings during the movie (or lack of). Some movies will connect with me, some won't. And this was one of the latter. It doesn't matter whether it was based on real life, I didn't feel anything at all during the movie. That doesn't mean I don't think war is terrible and I don't feel anything about the real events, just that, I didn't care for the movie. There's those movies where you think 'wow, that sucks for them' and then those movies where you feel total anger towards the people who did that to them and you totally sympathize with the characters. I didn't feel that way at all with this movie. I didn't get any messages or emotions it was trying to portray and therefore I didn't like it. The barn scene was the only scene in which I did feel those emotions.
I just blue myself. -
jrub583 — 14 years ago(February 03, 2012 02:20 PM)
Though this could be classified as beating a dead horse, Id like to make a contribution to the history department discussion.
This movie was based on research done by three Belorussian writers traveling in a run down car from one village to the next asking war survivors about their experiences. Though this obviously cant testify to how true to life some particular scenes were, especially the massacre scene (where a church, mind, is burned down, not a barn), I would like to believe, since Elem Klimov was known to have integrity and not one to bow down to his soviet masters (the script took 8 years to get approval), that he at least tried to accurately represent the psychology of war, both of its victims and culprits. And in fact his vision is not that black and white: if you pay attention you'll see a German soldier crying while shooting at the church, as you would notice a Belorussian Nazi, or one of the so-called glorified bunch being just as much a war criminal as the Germans to save his own skin (and I think there was some confusion as to him running around in his underwear, which was attributed to a lack of discipline on the side of the Germans). As to the aforementioned lack of discipline in the German army depicted, I personally think they pulled off genocide pretty efficiently in the movie, could hardly think of a better way to do it. Or is it that they should have neatly stood in battalions shouting heil hitler?
As to Nazis being depicted as villains in the movie, as opposed to other works where the enemy is more human, Id like to point out two of these works are from a WWI perspective, a trench war where everyone was equally screwed over in a war motivated by a decaying political system. In particular All quiet on the westen front is just the first in a series of books written by Remarque as an open question from his lost generation to the people who started the war and made all these young men cripples, and his views on the morality of war and those people is just as clear cut as come and see. In a way, its a manifest against the enemy within rather than around, which as far as I can tell is the same for the bridge, though I haven't seen it, but then why would it depict Americans as villains when they weren't? This also goes out to another argument saying there should have been another line about soviet soldiers equally killing other men. First of all, the Soviet Union lost 23 million people in the war, Nazi Germany 9. I think you'll agree theres a difference there. Secondly, where the allies did kill, they killed in at least a pretense of self defense (of their whole nations, not particular individuals) rather than for the purpose of "clearing out living space. With this in mind, I don't see how they could be made villains. Really, enlighten me, should the Belorussian partisans have stood by idly going Well you've killed all our loved ones, but were not going to do anything to you, after all, you're people too so as to be more humane? Or should they have been drinking vodka and swearing to be more believable? All and all, I think the whole argument comes down to confusing subject matters and thinking that if anti-war movie A I liked was like this, then anti-war movie B should be similar, and sorry, thats just not how life works.
On the matter of is the movie anti-war or propaganda, it's most likely a question of perspective more than not, but again, Elem Klimov pictured this as a sort of vision of the apocalypse meant to warn future generations, that sounds pretty anti-war to me. If it is propaganda though, it must be the only soviet propaganda movie I've ever even heard of with no mention of Lenin or Stalin. That in itself is admirable.
As to cheap effects used.. no. Choreographed bomb sequences (as in the woods) are by definition not cheap. And I'm not an expert on gun machines and the light effects they produce, but regardless of accuracy, pyrotechnics are not something to be taken lightly. And scenes of a village burning would obviously take considerable skill to compose and produce, since fire has that icky habit of spreading chaotically and such. That argument is simply invalid.
