The high marks this movie has earned are well deserved on the technical side, but the real point of the whole thing seems to be yet another strong dose of "eeeeevil fascists are ugly nasty beasts and yay for the poor, noble communists fighting to survive their reign of terror" in our faces. Everything outside the labyrinth element of the movie is designed to convey that message, and that's the majority of the screen time.
This eye-rollingly one-sided presentation is the only way such topics are ever treated in the movies we see since WW2. It seems that the hot war ended but the propaganda war never did. Reality was rather different, so I have to dock the movie several points for that dishonesty.
This eye-rollingly one-sided presentation is the only way such topics are ever treated in the movies we see since WW2. It seems that the hot war ended but the propaganda war never did. Reality was rather different, so I have to dock the movie several points for that dishonesty.