Must. Find. English. Subtitles. DVD .....

Tired of CGI, big budgets, anachranistic love side-stories, and political undertones of modern American military films?

Well, I just ran across something from one of my favorite nations that came out in 2007. Finland, my Finland. Too bad I cannot find in in DVD in North American format.

Check out the description,

Best thing about watching Tali-Ihantala is that you get to watch a different type of war movie after a while. The old school movie mandatorily adds women and children to plotwise useless roles to create the so called drama, but in Tali-Ihantala you get no Rambos, no cheese, no political ubercorrectness and nothing else but just war as it realistically should be, within production limitations of course.

The barrenness of no prolonged drama sequences and no main characters may strike some people as cinematographically unwise, but Tali-Ihantala is not the first war movie to use such a feature. Similar approach was used in "Thin Red Line" where there was no main characters either, but Tali-Ihantala tries not to be artsy and go too far. It comes close to a documentary but, in fact, it still is far from being a documentary.

Another film Tali-Ihantala is very close to is the "Longest Day", although the Soviet Union side is only shown as the enemy and only Finns will have any dialogue. The strenghts of the movie include fact that every main character has a historical counterpart, and a lot of authentic equipment was used in the making. The weaknesses are the limited production resources but every actor seem to do his best regardless of how amateur he is.

.... and the trailer.


Some numbers on the battle,

Finnish sources estimate that Soviet army lost about 300 tanks in the Tali-Ihantala, mainly to air attacks and close defence weapons. 120-280 Soviet aircraft were shot down.

The Finnish army reported that 8,561 men were wounded, missing and/or killed in action. Based on the daily and 10-day summary casualty reports of the Soviet 21st Army, the Soviets reported their losses as about 18,000-22,000 killed or wounded. The uncertainty about casualties rises from the fact that 25% of the forces of the 21st Army didn't participate in the battle.

Need more - here you go.