Wednesday, 29 October 2008

Heart-Wrenching

Very rare do I blog about movies. But this is one of those instances.

I watched Stalingrad with Jordan and Becky earlier, well, "last night." It was made back in 1993, and even more interesting, it attacks the same subject as Saving Private Ryan (the nightmares and ravages of warfare during the second World War) from the perspective of four German soldiers. Oh yeah, and it's all in German and Russian.

The film is brilliant. Steven Spielberg's film was good too, but this teaches the same lessons, but at the same time, shows them from a tragic perspective: when the soldiers are on the losing side, and when they ultimately die in the end. You feel sad for them. It's truly sad that it seems that the Germans were portrayed during World War II as Nazis and nothing but unthinking monsters doing Adolf Hitler's bidding. Surely not all of them were. Stalingrad shows what maybe some of them were like. Not perfect, no. But not monsters either. They became friends together. They had families at home. And they probably wanted to just go back home to Germany and carry on with life, just like the boys in the American forces did, too.

I think what encapsulates the brilliance of this film is in the moments right after one of the main characters, Müller, accidentally shoots his friend from his unit in close combat, mistaking him for a Soviet trooper. He shakes him, crying, "Dieter! Dieter!" begging him to wake up, and then screaming for a fellow German soldier to kill him because he just shot his friend. Later on, Müller starts to cry because of the whole ordeal. Later, I was thinking about how I would feel if I was in his place, having accidentally killed one of my best friends while fighting together as soldiers. And honestly... I can't imagine the pain. It kills me to even imagine it.

Such is the power of good filmmaking. And a powerful reminder of how thankful I am for my friends. And that yes, I love them like my family.

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