Review of The Fall of Berlin

The Fall of Berlin is a film made in the middle of Joseph Stalin's rule over the Soviet Union. Given what Stalin's iron grip over the country was like it's not really all that surprising that the film is just a big propaganda piece for him. I know calling films propaganda is usually partisan and the argument can be made that any film that makes any explicit political message is propaganda, but for reference the most famous scene in The Fall of Berlin seems to be immediately after the Soviets take Berlin and we're treated to a dancing celebration of not only Soviet soldiers but also liberated Holocaust survivors and German civilians before Stalin (Mikheil Gelovani) somehow shows up 5 minutes after the battle has ended and is basically praised as the savior of humanity. Moreover I think you can get away with calling a film propaganda if it was made just to exalt a dictator. Watching the film as a historical example is pretty interesting (and the very obvious inaccuracies can be ignored for obvious reasons) but after you take out all that it's just a poorly acted and somewhat cliched war story. Some of my favorite scenes involved Stalin himself but he's surprisingly not in the movie that much. The actual plot of the movie sees Alexei Ivanov (Boris Andreyev) a steel worker decorated by Stalin who falls in love with Natascha Vasilnyeva (Marina Kovalyova). But it all changes when the Nazis invade the Soviet Union and Alexei joins the Red Army to fight in the war. It's bland, cheesy, poorly acted, and after about an hour of it it just became a chore to watch. One impressive thing about the film is the amount of lookalike actors in all the roles. Aside from Stalin we have pretty identical portrayals of Adolf Hitler, Herman Goering, Vyacheslav Molotov, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Goebbels, and Georgy Zhukov (who was not on amazing terms with Stalin after the war and thus has his role in the film somewhat diminished). But aside from that and the interesting historical context of the film's existence, The Fall of Berlin is pretty boring, poorly acted, has a very barebones plot, and is way too long.