Gee, who are the good guys?

Yes, of course, I know that, with about 70% of German Army casualties having occurred on the Eastern Front, the evil Soviets were arguably more responsible for beating the evil Nazis than any of the other Allies, the good old USA included. However, the rooting interest in Stalingrad should be utilitarian, unless one is a patriotic Russian. I'm just laughing at the absurdity of representing the Soviet side as an innocent bunch of underdog, romantic paladins fighting for Love against Evil. This history is too recent to make a 300-style comic book movie out of it, where the ancient Spartans were the noble, outnumbered babyfaces fighting for Freedom and Democracy against the monster heel ancient Persians – or is it?

You're a little mixed up on your history. Stalingrad was only one of several major confrontations happening on the eastern front simultaneously, the other major one being the siege of Leningrad. "The rest of Moscow"? What's that? The Germans never controlled Moscow, they were pushed back in December 1941. The war on the eastern front was different than that on the other fronts, it was a clash of two radically different political systems, run by two equally ruthless and conscience-less dictators. There was no quarter, it was a fight to the death. That being said, Stalingrad and Leningrad were Hitler's targets because of their political value, not for any other real reason. He did not have to conquer either city to defeat the Soviet Union, (assuming he had the capability to defeat it, I do not believe so), he chose to waste hundreds of thousands of troops in an attempt to conquer these two cities, and the Russians made him pay dearly for it. If Germany had conquered and occupied Stalingrad, it would not have won them the war. They actually controlled most of it in the later stages. The Russians would still have encircled them and ultimately destroyed the armies there. By the same token, the Russians were willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of troops defending it, for the simple reason it bore Stalin's name, and seeing it conquered would be a major political blow, if not necessarily a military one.

"Say what you will about the USSR, but during WWII, without them the allies wouldn't have stood a chance. "

LOL, very naive idiocy I see. Please, tell me why Germany lost the Battle of Britain in the prime of the war then?

The Allies would've still won had the USSR fell, just like they still won in World War 1 when Russia fell.

Britain + US + Canada could've taken on Germany, just because they kicked the ever-loving *beep* out of Russia doesn't really mean anything, considering I have no idea where you get the thought of Germany being some invincible super-power that was only able to be defeated by the soviets draining their power.

No, it was unclear to me that the Russians were the good guys, at least before I saw the glowing trailer for this inspiring docudrama. The "good guys" executed 20,000 Poles in the Katyn massacre, reduced the population of Estonia by 20%, killed at least half a million German civilians, enslaved another 2 million of them, raped and pillaged wherever they went – and that just begins an impressive list of Russian achievements for “The Great Patriotic War”. The atrocities of the Germans are generally better known to the public in English-speaking countries, but that is only because the Hun had the disadvantage of being on the losing side in the war.

Perhaps the ideal outcome for audiences for Stalingrad would be that both sides lost in a Biblical Pyrrhic draw that eliminated all of the members of both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. A world without both Nazi and Soviet power after 1942, especially for Eastern and Central Europe, probably would have been a better place.

Just from the trailers, it appears that the film is indeed giving the Eastern Front the simplistic, black-and-white, 300-style treatment. The protagonists appear to be romanticized Russians, too. In any case, given how extremely brutal so many of the Russian and German soldiers were, I will not find it convincing if the protagonists are played as having actually been so many Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns and Albert Schweitzers deep down inside, yet compelled to be inhumane by the circumstances of terrible war.

In the big picture World War Two never would have happened if Stalin an the USSR had not enabled Hitler by joining with him as an ally in the late 1930's.

The fact is they triggered World WAr II together, as allies, invading Poland, with a secret agreement called the Molatov Ribbentrop Pact.

That pact was in effect from 1939 to 1941, when the German until Germany surprised its Soviet ally and attacked them in mid 1941.

Finland, France, Lithuania, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Greece, Estonia, and of course Poland were all attacked and occupied by the cooperating Soviet and Germans during this time.

As far as being bloodthirsty the Nazi did kill about twice as many non combatants as the Soviets did, and the Stalin took twice as along to do so (from the mid 1930's). I recommend the academically and critically acclaimed "Bloodlands" for the background on that.

You are correct on the Japanese. They managed to kill non combatants at stunning numbers -- and numbers hat wee actually increasing right up to the last days of the war in mid 45.

None of this is to take way from the heroism of the individual Soviet solders at Stalingrad.

"but the Nazis were pure evil"

Ahh, yes, the nazi's were "pure evil", in fact, we can see their "pure evil" in the very soul of Rommel himself, that "pure evil, bloodthirsy monster!" Who cares if he was never accused of a single war crime, or his unit, he was with Hitler, he was pure evil!

Lol, go read a history book kid.

Bdavis, repeating retarded *beep* doesn't make it true.

First of all, the allies would have been destroyed if they attacked the Red Army in 1945. The Russian army was plainly better than the allied one, and that's what Churchill's own generals told him after being ordered to plan for "operation unthinkable".

Second, your thoughts are imbecilic. Using your logic, "both the Germans and British should have lost" in the BoB, because both did bad things. The fact that the scale of said bad things are completely incomparable doesn't seem to matter.

You are a seriously clue-less twit. It wasn't Stalin killing civilians and POW's, it was the Russians. Secondly "Britain" was far from anything you could even remotely call "zionist" controlled. Even the US persecuted jews at the time as well.

Only an inbred conspirator would mention anything as being "zionist controlled".