Apologies if this is a film that crops up a lot in this subreddit, but after a viewing I could do with a discussion about this brutal masterpiece.Being a WW2 history nerd as I am, I decided to give the film a go as it had cropped up in a couple of Reddit threads. Various reviews described it as one of the most powerful films for depicting the utter brutality of the Eastern Front, and boy were they right.Caution - Spoilers BelowI'll admit that I spent the first half hour or so wrapping my head around the more surrealist elements of the film - the use of sound such as the ominous droning of German warplanes, the long dragging scenes with little dialogue, the horror-like pace of the film where things immediately go from bad to worse. At first I wasn't sure if this was really my kind of film... then, wow... just.. wow.The latter part of the film in which Florya comes into contact with the marauding SS troops, witnessing the true horror of what happens when a foreign facist force steams through villages as a single column of destruction absolutely blew me away.Obviously the most powerful example being the church burning scene. The carnivalesque dance of death which plays out almost seems too horrific to be real; SS troops singing, dancing and drinking while they round up the villages 'Partisan' inhabitants and summarily execute them makes the whole thing seem almost too macabre to be real, except it was...I've read a lot about the Eastern Front; there are many, many reports of the SS/Einsatzgruppen acting with such brutal violence - something the film paints with absolute detail; men acting like beasts, human beings treated like beasts. The lack of humanity in every scene is utterly heartbreaking to watch, as it would have been when the actual events played out all over Eastern Europe.For me the film paints the most brutal, unapologetic portrayal of war - it doesn't glorify heroism or the acts of soldiers, it actively depicts the true horror of war, in which everything around is sucked into a sort of vacuum in which atrocities, loss and human suffering become the norm, for both soldiers and civilians.This is the first film in a long time which has left me speechless, to the point where I needed a good sit down and a think about what I'd just seen. Truly stunning work.Thanks for reading. via /r/movies http://bit.ly/2T5J4bF
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