To put Hollywood (and by extension, the West) in its place, the Soviet state put their full monetary weight behind the production of an epic film. This meant a limitless budget, anything you could ask for and, interestingly, so much room for creative freedom.

This last point is fascinating as, often, having important funders (and you don’t get more important than with this) leads to reduced control and, often, to sanitised homogenisation. However, this is not the case here due to the aims of the project. Usually, big money is thrown at something because they want to make more money or, in some circumstances, because they want control over a piece of art. Here, big money was thrown at something with…

***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.***

⁍ 135,000,000+ viewers in the Soviet Union between 1966-1968
⁍ $100,000,000 budget, which would be surpassed until 1991 with Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
⁍ 105,000 tons of kerosene
⁍ 12,000 soldiers
⁍ 10,000 extras
⁍ 10,000 rifles
⁍ 7,000 swords
⁍ 1,500 horses
⁍ 300+ characters with dialogues
⁍ 200 firing cannons
⁍ 150+ actors for the ballroom sequence
⁍ 117 countries released this film in theaters
⁍ 103 filming locations
⁍ 100+ studio sets built
⁍ 52 tons of smoke compound
⁍ 25 takes for the ballroom sequence
⁍ 6.5 miles of film ~ 14 cans of film
⁍ 5 years to make
⁍ 2 heart attacks
⁍…

Words can’t even begin to describe how monumental this movie feels. Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace is a colossal achievement and an act of artistic devotion that feels like cinema operating at its highest possible level. At just over seven hours long, it demands time, patience, and attention. What it gives in return is awe, reflection, and a strange sense of peace. Rewatching it, especially all 4 parts in one day, felt like climbing Mount Everest. If you watch and finish it, I guarantee you’ll walk away with something meaningful, even if it’s just the satisfaction of having made it to the top.

Despite its epic runtime, nothing in War and Peace feels wasted. Every hour is dense with ideas,…

I’ll start with my reservations because I think the 5-star rating is fair even in spite of these:

The narration and voiceover seem oddly distributed. Some really poetic lines are given in these moments, but it makes you wonder why these lines specifically were lifted from the book and not others, and it at times feels redundant when the image tells us all we need to know (ie Lise’s final scene). While there’s a lot of great experimentation, there were naturally some editing choices that took me out of the film (very few though). My biggest complaint: it should’ve been longer. Now I’m not sure what marketing a film was like in the 1960’s Soviet Union, but I imagine there’s…

Film reviews in 22 sentences (or less)
Today: War and Peace

Reviews of each part:
Andrei Bolkonsky
Natasha Rostova
1812
Pierre Bezukhov
Read the German Version

Hi everybody, after writing a review to every single released part of this quadrology, we now want to conclude our thoughts in this complete review of Sergei Bondartschuk‘s „War and Peace“.
Leo Tolstoy‘s book belongs to the finest works of world literature and with nearly 40 million sold copies it also is one of the most successful books in history. The book shaped the ideology of a whole generation and formed a national spirit of an invincible and impregnable country. So for us this was one of the most impressive movie moments in 2020.…