It's the mark of a bad film when some of its most serious scenes remind you of Monty Python. This one seems to consist entirely of out-takes from a movie that actually had a story.
There's not much here, only people running stupidly around in a landscape; the stupidity of war. Men are captured, and shot; set free, then are shot; told to get in the river, then are shot (this happens a lot); told to take off their shirts, then are shot (this happened even more - there were so many men taking their shirts off I began to get suspicious). Then the people doing the shooting get shot. Nobody who is shot looks like he has really been shot - a shot rings out, down someone goes - it's kids falling down in the school playground.
In fact, the whole thing looks like a group of schoolchildren separated into two teams then let loose in a large open area to play war games, hiding in the grass, climbing walls, one side ambushing the other, only to be ambushed itself. We are introduced to various army officers from both sides - the dialogue consists almost entirely of army officers giving commands - some of them are interesting characters, but none of them last long. They strut around casually selecting, casually killing, often failing or forgetting to kill and hardly bothering about it.
The latter is the theme of the film if there is one, the senseless, arbitrary, game-like nature of it; the men succumbing to their fate mindlessly - eager to die as soon as they can. The film vaguely follows the fortunes of one man, but we don't get to know him, and whether it takes place in one day, or several months, I've no idea. We get a succession of mainly disconnected, mainly senseless scenes that build into a bigger picture of senselessness.
Men barely in command of brains, hundreds of men of dismal nonentity, herds of them running around shirtless with no more humanity than horses. The Volga scenery is good and some scenes are artfully mesmerising, with a clarity and calm that reminded me of the opening scenes of Andrei Rublev (and predates it) - but that's all I could get extract from it. War is senseless. Man is stupid. We know that.
There's not much here, only people running stupidly around in a landscape; the stupidity of war. Men are captured, and shot; set free, then are shot; told to get in the river, then are shot (this happens a lot); told to take off their shirts, then are shot (this happened even more - there were so many men taking their shirts off I began to get suspicious). Then the people doing the shooting get shot. Nobody who is shot looks like he has really been shot - a shot rings out, down someone goes - it's kids falling down in the school playground.
In fact, the whole thing looks like a group of schoolchildren separated into two teams then let loose in a large open area to play war games, hiding in the grass, climbing walls, one side ambushing the other, only to be ambushed itself. We are introduced to various army officers from both sides - the dialogue consists almost entirely of army officers giving commands - some of them are interesting characters, but none of them last long. They strut around casually selecting, casually killing, often failing or forgetting to kill and hardly bothering about it.
The latter is the theme of the film if there is one, the senseless, arbitrary, game-like nature of it; the men succumbing to their fate mindlessly - eager to die as soon as they can. The film vaguely follows the fortunes of one man, but we don't get to know him, and whether it takes place in one day, or several months, I've no idea. We get a succession of mainly disconnected, mainly senseless scenes that build into a bigger picture of senselessness.
Men barely in command of brains, hundreds of men of dismal nonentity, herds of them running around shirtless with no more humanity than horses. The Volga scenery is good and some scenes are artfully mesmerising, with a clarity and calm that reminded me of the opening scenes of Andrei Rublev (and predates it) - but that's all I could get extract from it. War is senseless. Man is stupid. We know that.