Letchik

This was made before the invasion of Ukraine, not propaganda, not made by or for Putin. Many Americans don't understand about Russia and WWII. They sustained horrendous losses, something like 20 million, compared to 400,000 for the US. A lot of it was fought in their own country after the Nazis invaded. As a result the war is more deeply embedded in the Russian psyche. US WW-2 movies are about soldiers doing brave things far from home. Russians were defending their own cities where they had homes, family and sweethearts. Pilots were the best of the best, and in the film he flies and Ilyushin-II, an armored close ground support aircraft. It was a great plane, an entirely Soviet design, and they were proud of it. It was ideal for the kind of fighting they were doing. The film shows it getting hit hard repeatedly before it came down, and this was realistic. It was a heavily armored, very tough plane.

This russian-made movie is also known as "The Pilot". It is not only excellently produced, but in my opinion also deserves to be more popular and have a better rating. It shows very well - like the movie "Into the White" - what a struggle it must be for a pilot that is shot down and stranded in enemy territory.

And yes - as is typical for many a russian-made movie - there is a tendency to make it a "hero movie", whereby a russian soldier performs the unthinkable. But honestly said, the 'heroics' were at an acceptable level (i.e. Not annoying), whereby the viewer gets to see some pretty good acting combined with quite impressive scenery, props, vehicles...

Overall, I deem this to be one of the better russian-made movies. As such, I score it at 6.9/10, which results in an IMDb rating of 7 stars.

The Pilot. A Battle for Survival is a tense, survival war drama that doesn't shy away from the horrors of battle. If there were another war film to which I would compare this, it would be Harald Zwart's 2017 Norwegian historical drama film, The 12th Man (Norwegian: Den 12. Mann). Both present a gritty survival at all cost and live to fight another day approach to the war genre.

I found the English voice overs hard to listen to. I changed the language to Russian and added English subtitles. After making that change, I enjoyed the movie.

A refreshingly realistic WW2 shot film, right down to the Russian "Ilyusha" (Ilyushin Il-2) ground attack warplane. The acting throughout was superb.

The ending credits to so many actual Russian WW2 pilots is a sobering and tragic reality of War.

Lest We Forget.