Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

gordonl56 ZVEZDA– aka : The Star : 2002The time is summer 1944 and the place is the Eastern Front. The Soviet summer offencive has bulled its way to the border with Poland. The Soviets have stopped to bring up supplies etc for the next series of attacks. In order to have a better idea of the opposing German forces, Soviet headquarters has sent out several recon squads. These squads have failed to return. Headquarters decides they really need the info, so out goes another patrol of recon scouts. The patrol sneaks through the German lines at night under cover of a Soviet artillery barrage. They keep off the roads and cut across country. There main objective is a railway station 30 miles behind the lines. The Soviets works its way towards the station, but are spotted by a German patrol. The chase is now on, the Soviets to gather information, and the German's to kill or capture them. There are several clashes with German troops and the patrol starts to lose members. They do however discover that the Germans are hiding forces in the deep forest for a counter attack. They are also setting up fake tanks etc near the rail station to fool Soviet aerial reconnaissance.They have the info needed, but have lost their radio in a clash with some SS troopers. They pull a raid on a German outpost and steal a German radio. While holed up in a barn, they manage to contact headquarters. They pass on the needed intelligence just before the Germans show with a large force. There is a bloody firefight with the Soviet patrol being wiped out to the last man. This is a pretty decent war film, with some nice looking cinematography and good attention to military detail. The German Tiger tanks are of course not real, but they do make an effort to make them look real. Same with the German half-tracks, they are really post war Czech built items. When the war ended, the Czechs just continued to build the Sd.Kfz 251 for their use. All in all, the film is well worth a look.

Theo Robertson After seeing the Russian film 9 ROTA set during the Soviet -Afghan conflict I was struck how similar it was to American war films which disappointed me since I was expecting something with a much more idiosyncratic style . I had better hopes for ZVEZDA since it is set during the second world war . The Soviet Union lost a grand total of 30 million citizens during the conflict . Putting it in to perspective both Britain and the USA lost around 350,000 war dead each . No Soiet family was left untouched and many Soviets died in the most cruel way possible . There's a famous Soviet film COME AND SEE which gives a small taste of the brutality of the Eastern front so I looked forward to this film with anticipation . Sadly like 9 ROTA I was disappointed with it for exactly the same reason - it seems more like a Hollywood movie than a Russian one The plot is simple . A team of reconnaissance scouts is sent behind Nazi lines to pick up information . It's obvious what director Nicolai Lebedev and the screenwriters are going to do with the story - they're going to make a suspenseful war drama where every five minutes the unit are in mortal danger of being caught . Two previous units on the same mission have disappeared and the unit come across the tortured bodies of one of their predecessors . This lets even the most uneducated audience members know that 1 ) The mission is dangerous 2 ) If they're caught they won't face a simple death of a bullet - they'll be skinned alive Unfortunately the more danger the unit face the more unlikely things become . For example two of the scouts climb aboard a German truck . All of a sudden Germans appear and drive the trucks off towards the German base . Two Germans sit in the back of the truck and suddenly become suspicious so pull out their pistols as they prepare to search he back . Then out of nowhere a Soviet air raid takes place allowing our scout heroes to make good their escape . Every time it looks like the unit are going to be caught something always happens that allows the unit to escape regardless of how unlikely it is . This scene also interferes with the time frame since the truck must have traveled several miles but the surviving scout manages to walk back to his unit in what seems a few minutes As far as I can remember the year isn't mentioned on screen but since the Red Army are on the frontier of the Western Soviet Union then it can only be happening in 1944 . This leads to a serious inaccuracy in the dialogue where the unit find out the Nazis are going to launch a counter-offensive with " 40,000 men and 2,000 tanks " What the Nazis had 2,000 tanks to spare in the Summer of 1944 ? I knew the biggest tank battle in history took place between the Wermacht and Red Army the previous year at Kursk where the Nazis had a grand total of 2,700 tanks . Certainly there's no way they could muster that amount of tanks in the Summer of 1944 so I take it the subtitles are wrong and should have read 200 . Even so this wouldn't have been enough to launch a counter-offensive against the Soviets who had an army of 1,500,000 ready to launch Operation Bagaration Things like this spoil the movie but it's not really a film that concerns itself with portraying history accurately otherwise we wouldn't be seeing scenes with a Soviet scout feeling sorry for the unit executing Nazi prisoners or references to " The liberation of Poland " . Its sole function is to keep the audience on tenterhooks as to the individual fate of the unit members . In this it succeeds to a large degree but one had hoped to have seen a much more " Soviet " type of film rather than a Russian film trying to emulate Hollywood

artlaub I seen this movie about 10 times, its always damn nice 2 see it. Its the favourite movie of my cousin and in the way 4 people who likes seeing war movies its a pure god's gift 4 them, cause with this movie the russians could shows the world that there are always even exist good regiseurs and actors who can make such a hearttouching and interesting good movie. This movie has a typical russian movie-end like movies in the perestroika time(1986-1991).Because typical is the tragic end without happy end. Other russian movies like avaria-doch menta(1989), pomiluj i prosti(1988), katala(1989), kamyshovyj raj(1989), igla(1988)....have such a typical end, too.But it means not that the movie is bad, the movies are still good movies.

eviltrav What struck me about this film was how Very Russian it was. Having spent some time in the country, enough to get a sense of how Russians like to view themselves, this films themes felt very familiar. The depiction of the female radio operator, was so cliche, and well almost laughable. The band of scouts seemed to scream hey look we're PC, we even have a central Asian guy. The group also largely reminded me of the gang from Saving Private Ryan. There was even the weedyl little guy who is too afraid to shoot. All this said, its not a BAD film, its quite enjoyable, and its always interesting to see a WW2 film that is not from the Allied side. Alas though it falls short of greatness, well short due its insistence on dragging out all the old WW2 films tricks. You have seen this all before, the film offers nothing new. The thing that always irked me about Private Ryan, was the overtly sanctimonious/God Bless America style ending. The Star has an equally patriotic finale, but somehow the Russian patriotism is less galling. Overall a solid film, good even, but its been done.