Inclubabu
Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.
Cleveronix
A different way of telling a story
Sameer Callahan
It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.
Enchorde
Recap: Depicts the events of the battle at Tali-Ihantala 1944 between defending Finnish forces and invading Soviet army. It is told from a Finnish viewpoint with the beginning hardships and retreat, the later establishment of a new line of defence, and the subsequent battle to hold that line.Comments: This is another very good Finnish war movie, made by director Åke Lindman, who also directed Framom främsta linjen (Beyond enemy lines). It has an impressive amount of extras and WWII equipment and so tells what feels like an accurate and plausible story of the events that occurred.What it lacks is a clear story. There are no real main characters that remain throughout the movie, no real story that develops independently from the historic events. Characters that are shown are those in the units engaged in the battle at each time. So, this is more of a dramatized documentary than a narrative movie.In that sense, I believe that you really need to enjoy film, and especially war movie, or be interested in war history, to enjoy this movie. If you do, I recommend it highly. If you do not, choose something else.Me myself both enjoy movies a lot, and am interested in history, so I enjoyed it very much. But even I missed the narrative story, to identify with certain characters a bit. But hopefully this is not the last epic Finnish War movie.7/10
Michael A. Martinez
I'm a huge fan of Finnish war movies. I went to great pains to import copies of TALVISOTA, both versions of TUNTEMATON SOTILAS, BEYOND THE FRONT LINE (a good, less-ambitious run-up to this film), and AMBUSH. Of all those, TALVISOTA is easily the best, though the 1955 version of SOTILAS is a close second. It seems to me all the others are in no way able to match TALVISOTA in terms of raw absorbing action, realism, and suspense.TALI-IHANTALA 1944 fails dramatically to establish any sort of narrative. There are no characters and no plot beyond sticking to historic events. You'll see a 10-minute vignette such as that of a forward artillery observer who gets wounded. When the Russians overwhelm his position, he runs off into the forest and the film never mentions him again! He's not the only one - this happens to every character! There is no closure or any attention given to anybody.The action scenes are plentiful and often exciting but feel sloppily, haphazardly staged, and often (in spite of lots of great period armor) quite cheap as well! The film even has to rely on stock footage for its portrayal of the German air assault later in the film. It makes you wonder why they even bothered including the subplot, as it adds absolutely nothing! We don't even get a sense of the damage being done or the amount of lives lost until the final shot in the film - which is just too little, too late.I am quite happy that they managed to rig up a lot of historically accurate T-34/85s and even an extremely rare (nowadays) T-34/76. Also look for StugIII's, an ISU-152, and a KV-IS. Great stuff - too bad they didn't make better use of it. I'm a big tank/war buff and I still found myself drifting off to sleep during the battle scenes. The immediacy just isn't there - especially when there's only a couple dozen extras as soldiers (with no ammo packs or anything, mind you) when there should be thousands! Refreshingly, at least for American viewers like me who are fed up with CGI, there is very little computer-generated anything in this film. In fact, I don't think there really was any at all besides a quick flyover by a Soviet plane or two.
David Igra
As always when making a film out of historical events one is challenged with the task of trying to engage the audience, usually by adding characters or embellishing characters already available thus allowing the viewer to relate and or follow the characters throughout the film.This film is bold enough not to fall for such obvious flirtations with the audience, it has little more story than the historical facts and the characters that appear do so just very briefly. All too briefly for anyone in the audience to remember little more than a name, maybe a rank.All in all it becomes a rather confusing experience with names and ranks and orders flying around in the Finnish forest with the only exception of a Russian tank blowing up, or was it a Finnish tank?
tomimt
If you are expecting your standard war film with a overly melodramatic love story plot line and all the other standard war film plot devices you are looking from the wrong place: Tali-Ihantala 1944 is more of a documentary trying to portray all the military units, which took part of the battle, which turned the war luck in Finland/Russia war to the advantage of Finland.For a movie there is just too many characters in the story, which are left to the background of the greater drama of warfare. The film shows quite effectively how the military units work together and solely. There's very little sugar coating of the war, so in a word, you could have made three or four different war films from the material portrayed here in. The biggest issue here is, that this would have worked much better as a documentary series, with each episode concentrating on different units and key people. Now the film is too heavy, yet still too short.
