Rent Battle for Sevastopol (2015)

Watchable romanticised biopic of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, top female WWII sniper in Ukraine - Battle for Sevastopol review by PV

A very timely film showing how united Russia and Soviet Union member The Ukraine were in WWII. The languages are almost the same - as with Croat and Serbian, the big difference is the alphabet used for writing it (Cyrillic for Russian, Serbian; our Latin alphabet for Ukrainian, Croatian etc). I wonder what she and all the loyal Soviet/Ukrainian soldiers would make of the new war in early 2022.

The facts here are distorted with fictitious characters added and the story Hollywoodised and romanticised - too much really, and it seems focused on her as a woman proto-feminist rather than as a soldier - hence Eleanor Roosevelt book-ending the film. Yes, Lyudmila had a son - in 1932 aged 16 in a short-lived first marriage which gave her the Pavlichenko surname. No mention of that. She married again age 25 but her husband was killed in the war. She later struggled with alcoholism and depression and died age 58.

She had 309 confirmed kills as a sniper - impressive for sniper. Most snipers were and are male - excellent spatial-awareness is a must. But she was the exception which proves the rule maybe. She had 187 kills at the siege of Odessa. The USSR fought Romanians (fighting for Germany) there - the latter won. There followed the siege of Sevastopol in Crimea, where she only trained snipers in real life. So fiction is bent to a new convenient reality in this film.

I enjoyed the movie - and interesting to see Woody Guthrie and hear his song about Pavilchenko, who visited the USA to speak and garner support for US troops to open a second front in 1942. Fascinating., I wonder how true it all is. It is true she said these words to US soldiers: "Gentlemen," she said, "I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist invaders by now. Don't you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?"

She also visited the UK in November 1942 - and spoke at Birmingham and Coventry.

Some awful dubbing here and casting Russians/Ukrainians to play American journalists as they have some English is a woeful error.

However, 4 stars.

A good war movie in the Russian tradition - Battle for Sevastopol review by Philip in Paradiso

Battle for Sevastopol is a 2015 biographical war film about Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a young Soviet woman who joined the Red Army to fight the Nazi invasion of the USSR during WWII. The movie revolves around the events of the siege of Odessa and the siege of Sevastopol. Against the backdrop of the war, the heroine gets involved romantically with various men.

L Pavlichenko became a very successful sniper, killing over 300 enemy soldiers during the war. She is one of the top Russian/ Soviet snipers of all times and, allegedly, the female sniper with the highest kill number of all times.

The movie is well-made in the Russian tradition. It is a good war movie and there is humour, here and there. There is, however, something a little bit predictable about the story (but it is in fact a true story...), which has, perhaps, more to do with the way the film is shot. It's hard to say what it is, but there is something that is missing, which could have turned what is a good war movie into an unforgettable war epic.

Also, living conditions in Stalin's USSR cannot have been as comfortable as shown in the film, I would have thought, more particularly when it comes to food supplies, which appear plentiful!

Still, it is a good film that I would recommend. And the central character was certainly an extraordinary person.