MUGEN Motherland

Ah, Enemy at the Gates... I was expecting at least a decent WW2 film, but what I've got was just a cliched steamy romance with no bloody close quarter combats, no tanks advancing, artillery barrages, bombings sequences but german soldiers getting sniped down and Major König sniping down the Red Army snipers one by one until he gets killed by Vassili (The main idiot character).

Yeah, that's Enemy at the Gates on a nutshell: a very bad resume of what happened during the battle of Stalingrad.

The first battle sequence is so bad that is hilarious: Thousands of idiots soldiers, half of them carrying Mosin-Nagant rifles and the other half carrying five rounds of ammunition hopelessly charging against a single (well placed) german regiment while the Red Army officers does nothing but urge the idiots soldiers to keep the charge while the idiots soldiers get all mowed down by german fire or get PWN3D by a 1910 Pulemyot Maxim machine gun when they start to retreat (With the exception of Vassili and another idiot Danilov)... OMFG.

No wonder why the WWII Red Army veterans got pissed off about this film...

1- Both armies had a goddamn military structure, with their own specific units, commanders and organization. Not to mention that both sides deployed a large number of tanks, artillery and aircraft which for some odd reason is barely shown in the ENTIRE film (And it appears mostly as background elements, AUGH!).

2 - Red Army soldiers and officers weren't a bunch of idiots that hopelessly ran towards well protected enemy positions and repulsive sadists that used whistles, megaphones and machine guns as means of controlling the soldiers, respectively. The first battle sequence would make some sense if it was an WWI movie, were the Imperial Russian Army was composed mostly by peasants with little or no military training at all, but were talking about the WWII: even the lowest soldiers of the Red Army knew how to handle their weapons (Though most of them didn't knew how to clean them, but that's another story);

And the officers were competent enough to hold the german advance: General Chuikov (Which doesn't appear in the film, apparently because the director decided to put Nikita Khrushchev as the commander of the army at Stalingrad for bullsh*t reasons) for example sucessfully managed to exploit the weaknessess of the german blitzkrieg with tatics such as forcing the german tanks and infantry to enter the city, where the rubble and chaos delayed their advance, making the tanks vulnerable to soviet fire and cutting the effectiveness of the german infantry (Armed mostly with cumbersome bolt-action rifles) with sniper fire and close combat with the soviet infantry, well supplied with grenades and submachine guns.

3 - The film only focuses on the snipers too much. So much in fact, that it gives the conclusion that the Red Army won the battle of Stalingrad because they sniped down the german army to death...

Heck, the combat sequences without snipers are basically soviet idiots soldiers charging against the german soldiers without the support of tanks, artillery fire or aircraft and where's the urban warfare that was so common during the battle? Where's the fights for the control of the kitchen or the living room? OH GOD, WHERE???

Oh and if it that wasn't bad enough, guess what? They put a love triangle between Vasilli, Danilov and a stupid girl Tania, which later is struck down by a shrapnel (Yay!) and some stupid kid Sasha, that tries to help the main idiot Vassili, by acting as a double agent to lure Ed Harri... Ahem, Major König into an ambush, but ends up getting killed (Yay!) and after an anti-climatic "duel" between Vassili and König, it's revealed that the stupid girl Tania is still alive (Goddamn it!).

IMO, this movie not wasted down lots of interesting elements of the battle of Stalingrad, such as the urban warfare which was a shock for the Wehrmacht (Which was used to engage the enemy on open field with ample tank, artillery and aircraft support) but they also put a f*ckin' steamy romance on it.

Though it had some good moments, such as when the stupid boy Sasha dies and when for a moment you think that the stupid girl Tania was also killed (But unfortunately the sh*tf*ck who made this "thing" director decided to keep her alive... Which makes the film even worse, IMO).

Overall, it's one of the worst WWII movies I've ever saw. Even though I know that Hollywood doesn't like to make historically-accurate productions, I still think that if this movie at least shown the urban warfare, the tatics used by both armies and didn't focused so much on building wrong images about the soviet side it would be at least decent... But it isn't.

Final score: 3.5 out of 10