The Star

With the Nazis encroaching deeper into the USSR, the defenders mobilise a small unit to penetrate the enemy lines and try to find out just where they are storing their fuel and unloading their vast supply of tanks and other munitions. They've gathered enough intelligence to appreciate that if this squad can't get this information, then an enormous invasion will start for which they are ill-equipped to deal. The task is handed to the young "Travkin" (Igor Petrenko) and his half dozen soldiers and so they set off into the hornet's nest. On the face of it, this is just another wartime adventure where a tiny force is set to overcome overwhelming odds and do their own sort of "Dirty Dozen" style of thing. This is a bit more sophisticated than that, though, as it really does depict well just how young and inexperienced the young men, who were plunged into these truly hellish scenes, had to use what wits and guile they had to stay alive. Barely out of their teens, most of them, they must get used to the death around them but also to the acts of killing that are a new and fairly traumatic experience. It's these performances from the likes of Aleksey Panin and Artyom Semakin that really do ram home the brutality of their environment and at the random nature of warfare. Those that they encounter in frequent life-or-death situations are little older or more experienced, and just as terrified, as themselves. Sure, it's all a little propagandist but then weren't so many other movies made about WWII by the British and the Americans? This has much less of the gung-ho, ye-ha, to it - it does try to characterise the vulnerabilities of these young men, whilst also showing their strengths as individuals - and there are some light-hearted moments for us there - as well as their developing cohesiveness as a unit after an admittedly predictably rocky start. The production is all pretty standard but it has a certain freshness to it that carries it along and the ensemble deliver the spirit of petrified camaraderie quite effectively.