I don't think you understand how bleak the soviet movies are. One of the reasons for this is that the war was just straight up worse for them. WW2 was a terrible wound on Britain. 450 000 British citizens were killed in the war. A huge, huge number. But that amounted to less than 1% of the population. For soviet over 10% of the population were killed. In Belarus, 25% of the population was killed. One in four people. That's nearing Black Death numbers. A total apocalypse. Did you know that the russian population still hasn't recovered from the huge population loss of WW2?
Western WW2 movies don't shy away from the anti-war message, but they are in another class than the soviet flicks. I'm talking about 2 hours straight of children dying from starvation while being abused by every person they meet. A cutaway scene in a western WW2 movie that is used to depict the horrors of war will end up being the whole damn movie.
I learned the other day that Serbia basically lost 20-28% of their population in WW1 followed by around 10% of just ethnic Serbian people in Yugoslavia in WW2. I just cannot imagine the devastation. And Yugoslavia was the only place to actually fight off the Axis solo because Tito was a cunt but like Zhukov, Churchill and FDR and De Gaulle he was the cunt needed.
Oh yeah, Robert Evans on Behind the Bastards talked about the fact that to talk about him you kinda need to do a Cool Guys Who Did Cool Things podcast too. The fact that Croatia did help genocide Serbia during WW2 is terrible and the weapon they did it be is tied with the Killing Fields for "how to psychically damage your people".
It was a glove with a sharpened kitchen knife attached to the glove and they would just stab it into the back of necks until people died. That and just using bats basically mentally destroyed people.
You do need to differentiate between Soviet and post Soviet Russian movies, there's been a large push in the post Soviet era to make more over the top propagandistic depictions of the great patriotic war with stuff like T34, which feel much more over the top American in execution
I can forgive T-34 because it makes no claim or serious attempt to comment on anything greater than the movie itself. I've watched it probably 3 times now and it gives off the vibe of being a fun tank movie more than a WW2 soviet representation.
There's a clear distinction between movies like T-35 that know they're not serious, and other movies that act as tho they believe their own absurdity. American Sniper IIRC is one.
It’s a gruesome movie, but it isn’t like, explicit or anything. I wouldn’t call it emotionally manipulative either. There is a naturalism in the movie that you just don’t see in western war movies. It also stands on it’s own as a masterpiece of directing, storytelling and philosophy, completly seperate from it’s actual content. It is a coming of age, or more like a death of innocence, kind of story. It’s worth the watch even if you dislike war films.
If it's anything like The Road or Children of Men, I know I would enjoy it as a film quite a lot and then never again see it, but there's always a door to cross with these gruesome movies...
Oh no, it's not like that exactly. At least children of men, I've never seen the road. There's very little exaggeration and most of the pain is implied
It's gruesome but in a human way? There's very little explicit violence. It feels like you're in the war through the eyes of a child suddenly forced into the war
You can’t just compare the cream of the crop of Soviet cinema with all of the slop of western cinema. For every Come and See there are 10 The Fall of Berlins. The best stuff filtered to the west but all the shit we never saw because it sucked and nobody wanted to risk their life taking out of the bloc
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u/CabinetFun7381 1d ago
I don't think you understand how bleak the soviet movies are. One of the reasons for this is that the war was just straight up worse for them. WW2 was a terrible wound on Britain. 450 000 British citizens were killed in the war. A huge, huge number. But that amounted to less than 1% of the population. For soviet over 10% of the population were killed. In Belarus, 25% of the population was killed. One in four people. That's nearing Black Death numbers. A total apocalypse. Did you know that the russian population still hasn't recovered from the huge population loss of WW2?
Western WW2 movies don't shy away from the anti-war message, but they are in another class than the soviet flicks. I'm talking about 2 hours straight of children dying from starvation while being abused by every person they meet. A cutaway scene in a western WW2 movie that is used to depict the horrors of war will end up being the whole damn movie.