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5 internautes sur 6 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
2.0étoiles sur 5
About as much fun as being there., Jui 25 2004
"Stalingrad" is the most depressing film I've ever seen. Mind you, I didn't think a story about the death of 260,000 German soldiers would be as uplifting as, say, "The Sound of Music" but this movie pulls out all the stops in an effort to leave the viewer a quivering, glassy-eyed emotional pulp.Made by the same producers who gave us the seminal "Das Boot" I found it not in that league. The film is overlong, sterotypical, and spends too much time cramming postwar German conscience pangs down the viewer's throat. Moreover, the last hour or so reminds me of those interminable scenes from "Born on the Fourth of July" that seem more interested in punishing the audience than advancing the story. The battle for, and siege of, Stalingrad, was no doubt an experience of horror and misery beyond the power of words or images to describe it, but what I was hoping for here was a German version of "Saving Private Ryan" -- high on combat and confusion, short on moralizing. Unfortunately, all postwar German cinema is filtered through the same revisionist political opinions; this explains why all German war movies inevitably leave you with the feeling like you've been punched in the stomach or clubbed over the head. After about an hour I was hoisting my own flag of surrender; but the pummeling continued. The scene at the airfield, for example, when the wounded men are trying desperately to get out on the last transports, is very hard to watch. From what I've read, however, it seems that discipline in the Stalingrad pocket was maintained until the bitter end, and the airfield scene may more resemble how the producers of the film wanted history to unfold rather than the actual way it did. In fact, the 90,000 men who lived to surrender (all but 5,000 of whom died in captivity) did so only when they were completely out of fuel, medicine, and ammunition, and had no other means to resist; but the producers, of course, permit to trace of pride in military accomplishment to enter into their film. Most American movies and television portray the Germans in World War II as heel-clicking cartoon idiots ("I know nutink! Nutink!"). Most German war movies portray the Germans as either villainous martinet Nazis, or cynical disbelievers who carry arms only for Germany and not for Hitler or the Party. In fact, the record shows that the Germans overwhelmingly trusted Hitler and were deeply inspired by his ideology. It is this fact, and not what was done in the name of National Socialism, that seems to sit very hard in the modern German stomach.
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