First of all, I must confess that I have a bias for Russian movies, because I spent considerable time in learning (at least, to some extent) the language and now being able to understand a movie in Russian gives me a special satisfaction. This war story reminds me of the US classic "The Bridges at Toko Ri": Brubaker and Soshnikov are both motivated by their sense of duty to take part in a war far from homeland, both have wives and families they love. Compared with other recent Russian war movies (e.g., "Tanks", "T34", "Devjataev") the tone is much more realistic, a total or partial happy ending is not foreseeable, but I've found in this movie the pathos of older Russian war movies about the "great patriotic war" (the name they use for WWII) I like so much. All in all: were do we get such men?