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Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Blistering performances.

I still cannot make much of that film. Made in 1967 and savagely ruined by the Soviet Censorship, it was never aired and promoted much, and I never heard of it until much later in modern Russia. I was intrigued and wanted to see this work. People told me it's a work of sheer genius and a sheer art. I watched it many times, very accurately and diligently. I still am deeply disturbed and confused. But then, what do we know about war? Is it a grand epic Technicolor feature with great actors and epic special effects? Or is it a dull deep monotony of pain and misery? Here, it is neither. It is so casual, simple and brutal, that you just sit with an open jaw. Yes, I agree that often the camera work makes it almost impossible to grasp who shoots and who is killed and why. But then, this is a severe and sober reality of war - dry, vapid, gory, sad, hopeless, tragic, heinous, suffocating and dreary. This was probably like it was. No heroism every minute or acts of feat. Maybe. But for the most part, it was dry and painful. Just like the movie

it is strange to write a review about this film out of words. memorable images. drawing of civil war. propaganda under a special atmosphere. delicate emotions. brutal Manichean. a film about basic values in poetic clothes. because it is difficult to bot discover it like a kind of poem. patriotic, sure. but, in fact, only deep bitter. a movie about broken world. about silhouettes of existences. about death , orders, and sacrifice. a gloomy scene. and cloudy pieces of events. not heroes. only victims. so, final impression, in my case remains a Christian work. in which the Reds are promoters of Cross law. as martyrs. as proofs of Resurrection. as fragments of unique beauty of things. must see it ! for the subtle delicacy of its essence.

This should have been a good movie about chaotic actions in war.However, director Jancso is too heavy handed in his nazi idealism to let the cards lie wherever they may lie.Jancso contrives every single situation, and it becomes obvious very quickly.We know exactly what will happen, and when it will happen, for the most part.The trouble is that Jancso tries to force his will upon the story, instead of letting the chaos of war tell the story.He carefully controls every frame, and leaves nothing to "natural" flow of events.This becomes way too obvious in his relentless, contrived choices.Jancso is so eaten up with his worship of Hitler's Aryan women, that he fails to see how much he contrives this movie to make it look like Aryan blond women are survivors, and beautiful brunettes aren't. He contrives this so arrogantly, that he looks like an idiot.Of course there are still many neo Nazis who serve as his target audience, so he has a market.For the rest of us, this pile of garbage is another epic fail by a director who takes zero chances, and falls into every cliché imaginable.

As a muted treatment of the ephemeral moral horrors of war, this is good and will appeal to an audience tired of Spielberg - or the equally histrionic depictions of carnage of Russian war films.Something else appears to me greatly, something of specific nature here about visual (cinematic) presentation of a story. And that is because it seems like a smart , elegant solution to the problem of portraying what I call disembodied consciousness; keeping the viewer consistently tethered to the point-of-view of a character is hard enough for most filmmakers, but to break free of that and send us scudding through the air of the story? While keeping us engaged in story? Few manage, very few.It is this, I believe, that viewers appreciate when they praise the 'hypnotic' qualities of someone like Tarkovsky, this ability to start 'in character' and slowly expand ourselves to hover out of self to where multiple visions are possible - usually the world of story and sense, plus the mechanisms transmuting the world into a story. If you are positioned the right way as a viewer, this can achieve a feeling of ecstacy.And this guy is using Tarkovsky's camera to excellent effect, and knows just how to position the viewer. What does this mean?His first job is to remove hard storytelling limits. Which war this is. Who is killing who. Who to be rooting for. What is the cause that justifies all this, if any. We can surmise, but staying within clean boundaries is not the focus. In place of that, he supplies a more fluid notion of hyperreality - things happen presumably as they would if you were there, explanations are absent, but the consequences seem real. You may not know just who is out to kill you, but you know someone is. This is a world with angry blood coursing through its veins.Now for the actual, ecstatic expansion of narrative limits. It is simply superb the way he does it, and still seems novel and powerful to me.The normal viewing mode is that already within the first couple of minutes of a film, we scan the frame for a protagonist to latch onto, trusting he will be our assigned avatar in the world of the film. The filmmaker provides expressive enough faces that we implicitly recognize as such, that we follow for just the right amount of 'real' time to invest into, then suddenly they are removed from the world, maybe to resurface later. Characters are flippantly ordered shot, make narrow escapes, are summarily discovered again, and so on.And a third expansion is of the way we see and navigate this world, by having the camera trace circles around the story and float in and out of corridors in the air, disembodied from any character.Though still in the experimental stage, this is great work.You have bloodshed as your base layer, what every other war film works from. You have this force in man, in the gears of the universe, that moves him to kill which there is no rhyme to, beyond the perpetuating of motion. And you have that motion so powerful, we see that in the frantic running of prisoners to escape the firing squad, it enters the human world and mindlessly tears anchors from the ground, and sends our eye skidding to the next turn of the world having stable form again and tears at it, and with each groundless , spinning turn of this ballet, we float farther and farther away to where it is all an abstract blueprint.Fluid hyperreality, narrative, and eye - each one placing you a step further from reasoning with this, but deeper in the abstract experience of not just life, of cosmic dimensions in the transitory dance of everything coming into being and going again.Humans are vanished and reinstated and vanish again, with death as flippantly decided as someone dismounting a horse, as though it's all a part of some inscrutable game to the amusement of capricious gods.Better yet, this is samsara; the cycle of suffering and defilements, causing eternal transmigration to no purpose.