You won't believe that movie with the budget of 5 million dollars (by the time it was produced, now with the current currency value it is lower) can look like a 100 million dollars blockbuster. In the cinema it hits your brain like a truck. No CG-rendering of tanks, all those models of Pz-III, Pz-IV were scratch-built or borrowed from museums, though some models were smaller than real (like 1:1,5) and put after combined view processing. Guns shooting real bullets (experts of WWII might prove that),that's why sounds are real. All the blasts are real as well. Also the details of clothes, ammunition and tactics from both sides are perfectly given and approved by team of historical experts helping the director. The only woman in the movie takes like 16 seconds of your attention, all the 2 hours are about War. All in all, if you didn't understand earlier how Nazis lost 80% of their total armies in the East Front, that is a quite an example of real battle happened 16th November 1941 under Moscow near Dubosekovo (Petelino).

I usually prefer to talk about the a film, what's on the screen and not about what's going and what's being said around it, but I'll make a slight exception.

Russia churns out a lot of war films and a lot of films with patriotism as the key (sometimes only) ingredient. There is an understandable fatigue of these films (just like some are tired of comic book or superhero films) so people are now giving low scores to any war film, regardless of its merits.

Russia also has a lot of people that love to see Russian films fail. Russia produces a lot of trash and cash-grab (popsa) films so you have people that call everything that comes from Russia as popsa and want to see it fail.

No, this film is not a box office failure nor a financial failure. Yes, the budget is underreported, (which is strange considering people want to see bigger budget films) but it seems to have made its money back already. One cannot compare it to American films with bigger budgets, star power, the advantage of English, etc.

Without going into spoilers, this film is about a battle, or series of battles, between a Nazi Germany Panzer division and Soviet (Russian and Kazakh) defensive positions. If you want a love story, you've come to the wrong place. If you want a superhero, you've come to the wrong place. Rambo doing it all by himself, taking down the Wehrmacht and killing Hitler himself? Wrong place.

This film has been de-Sovietized, reducing references to Stalin, red flags, Marxism, Communism, etc. People seem to take issue with that and feel that this point makes this film a 1/10 film.

The fact is defending a trench is defending a trench. It makes no difference if one does it for the union of republics (USSR) or for a particular republic (RSFSR). In this case, the soldiers were defending (the road to) Moscow and it was not inaccurate that they were defending Russia. Yugoslav WW2 films also have people talking about taking/defending particular regions (Slavonia, Vojvodina, Kosovo, Serbia, etc.) and that does not necessarily mean they denied the existence of Yugoslavia.

Not that this film has not been de-Sovietized. It has, but it's not such a big deal. People still referred to each other as comrade, and yes, there were not a lot of flags and hammer-and- sickle stuff, but this was an undersupplied unit, lacking both men, guns, ammo and supplies.

The production values are quite high and this film lacks the TV-cheesiness of many Russian films and shows.

The Russians are not presented as good people, nor are the Nazis presented as evil. There is no need for that. We know who's who. This was like two boxers in the ring - "this is where we are now. Let's settle this."

It's dark, without being gloomy and depressing. It's violent without being disgusting.

It has professional acting, professional camera work, professional lighting, sound and CGI.

The script is not very deep because this is a film about men defending a trench. It sets out to do one thing and does it very, very well.

8/10.

As the first ever crowd-funded movie it came out amazing. The story about men who stood up for their country is not new in cinematography. But the way it was presented in this movie is very special. It's at the same time very simple and keeps you emotionally tense till the very end. The story about men who had to put on the table even more than they had. Who knew that they will die and most likely still won't stop the enemy but still did their best. Main characters are played by the actors of different nationalities that corresponds to the reality of the WWII, when the whole world stepped into a fight. Filming crew did an amazing work on battle action and special effects. This movie really touches the soul.