Soldier Boy (2019)

 

            “Soldier Boy” is a Russian movie about the youngest soldier in WWII. Sergei Aleshkov served in the Red Army starting at age 6.  He was awarded the Medal “For Battle Merit.”

            Sergei “Shereshka” Aleshkov (Andrey Andreev) is a six-year old boy when Germans come to his village.  The Germans target the village because the villagers supported partisans.  His mother and brother are killed and the village is burned.  Since his father was already dead, Shereshka is now an orphan.  He wanders into the forest and a few days later he is found by Soviet troops.  They take him back to camp and everyone immediately falls in love with the little boy.  He is nursed back to good health and given a little uniform to wear.  Commander Kutzenov (Victor Dobronravov) takes the boy under his wing.  Aleshkov is eager to be a soldier and Kutzenov gives him relatively safe jobs like delivering letters and bringing ammunition to the soldiers during battles.  In one of his delivery runs, he helps capture some Germans.  Meanwhile, he is playing matchmaker for Kutzenov and a pretty nurse named Katya.

            “Soldier Boy” is an unchallenging war movie aimed at families.  It’s about what you would expect from a movie about a six-year-old orphan adopted by a combat unit.  Since the screenwriter doesn’t enhance the story much (see below), it comes off as charming rather than hard-hitting.  This is not “Ivan’s Childhood”.  It would be similar to if Walt Disney made a movie about Johnny Clem (a drummer boy who fought in the Battle of Shiloh).  I can imagine it being a popular movie to show in elementary classes in Russia today.  Teachers will need to give some background because the movie does not give any big picture to the story.  It is unclear whether his unit is retreating or advancing, for instance.  It also ends abruptly, so we don’t learn what happened beyond the couple of months covered in the movie.  We don’t even get a post script about what happened to him.

            The target audience was clearly youngsters because there is nothing even PGish.  The wandering in the forest is a bit nightmarish, but the combat is not graphic.  There is a scene where Aleshkov tries to find Kutzenov in a bombed out dugout. However, Andrey Andreev is so darn cute, you know nothing is going to happen to him.  In fact, the child actor is the main reason for grownups to watch the movie.  Plus if you watch the movie with your kids, you can turn to them and say “what have you accomplished by age 6?”

            The other reason you might want to watch it is it is based on a true story.  Unfortunately, we are talking about a Soviet war story from the Great Patriotic War.  How much of it is propaganda?  It’s hard to say, but at least the movie sticks pretty closely to the official story.  That version has the boy being between 6 to 8 years old when the attack on the village occurred.  He was found in the forest by members of the 142^nd Guards Infantry Regiment of the 47^th Guards Rifle Division.  He was covered with insect bites (which the movie does not recreate) and was given medical care.  He become something of a mascot and was given a pint-sized uniform.  He was adopted by Mikhail Vorobyov (I don’t know why the commander’s name was changed for the movie) in order to keep him from an orphanage.  Seryozha did push his adopted father into the arms of the regimental medical officer named Nina Bedova (again, no idea why the name change).  He did deliver letters and ammo.  Amazingly, the reporting of two Nazi artillery spotters hiding in a haystack is basically what is shown in the movie.  However, I found no evidence that he crawled into no man’s land to splice a communications wire.  That’s the one enhancement the movie makes.  Oddly, by ending after a couple of months, the movie does not cover his unit being in the Battle of Stalingrad.  We don’t see him almost drowning in a river crossing or surviving a vehicle that hit a mine.  Nor do we see him being wounded by shrapnel, and his return to the unit.  And we don’t learn that he was taken off the front line when the Soviets reached Poland.  He was presented with a pistol by a Russian general and sent to a military school.  He ended up as a lawyer and died in his 50’s from lung cancer.  Thankfully, the movie does not show him getting addicted to cigarettes at a young age.  (https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/youngest-soldier-of-wwii.html)

            I watched “Soldier Boy” in preparation for a list of the best preteen characters in war movies.  I was pleasantly surprised that it might not be memorable, but it is entertaining.  And I learned about the supposed youngest soldier in WWII.  Several of the other children in war movies on my list are realistically depressing.  There are few, if any, war movies that will go as far as killing off a major child character, but many do not hesitate to put them in peril.  War sucks for children, soldiers or not.  It’s nice to see a movie where the main character is an unremarkable little boy who did more than play soldier and his effect on the hardened adults around him. 

 

GRADE  =  C