Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Strong and Moving!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

This could be the ultimate epic film: an overwhelming sequence of extraordinary visual set-pieces on the grandest possible scale. Director Sergei Bondarchuk seizes every opportunity to deliver gargantuan spectacle with all the manpower and resources at the command of the Soviet state. His filming of the Battle of Austerlitz, the Battle of Borodino, the burning of Moscow, and the retreat from Moscow is patently a determined quest for the visually superlative, and it is a successful one. Even the depiction of such lesser events as a court ball and a wolf-hunt is lavish to an astonishing degree.In the face of all this phenomenal effort, expense, and ingenuity, it seems downright ungrateful to say that my appetite for such brilliant grandeur was well and truly sated long before the end of the film. I started to notice that the acting and the music are sometimes rather less than superlative. More seriously, I felt the lack of narrative drive. Bondarchuk appears much more interested in the fate of armies and nations than in the fate of individuals. The great spectacles are what matter to him, and the human stories of "War and Peace" are merely fitted into the interstices. One never gets close enough to the characters. There is a lack of concern for story-telling, perhaps because this is an adaptation made by Russians for Russians, i.e., by and for people who already know the novel very well. Would anyone who has not read the book really be able to follow the film? I am doubtful. On the other hand, viewers who have read it are likely to miss access to the inner life of the characters. Of course, this is one of the unavoidable difficulties of filming any novel. Suffice it to say that Bondarchuk displays no particular skill in getting round it. Repeated use of short voice-overs to convey unspoken thoughts is not altogether effective. On a more technical note, the sound-recording fails to create a sense of intimacy. Often, regardless of whether the actor is seen to be near or far, the volume of his voice is just the same.The central character of Pierre Bezukhov seems to me miscast. (The director, I learn, chose himself to play the role.) Unless I am remembering the novel wrongly, this Bezukhov appears too prim, too secretive, too calculating, and plainly too old. He frequently comes across as a disapproving bourgeois in the midst of aristocratic excess.The problems of the viewer in following the narrative are increased by the casting-director's rather limited notions of what constitutes good looks. Among the men, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, Dolokhov, Kuraghin, and Prince Bagration are all of broadly the same physical type. The same may be said of the young women, Natasha, Soniya, and Mariya (not that the latter two receive much attention). As usual in historical films, some of the women have hair-styles and make-up more suggestive of the time in which the film was made and than the time in which it is set. Anachronistic music within the film is also occasionally distracting.This massive patriotic prestige project is worth seeing. The battle-scenes are absolutely outstanding. Its ostentation, however, means that the personal stories of Bezukhov, the Bolkonskys, and the Rostovs are by no means as absorbing and affecting as they ought to be.

Having read the novel and seen the full version just now, in one sitting, in a theater (Film Forum in NYC), it is an incomparable experience and one of the two or three best novel-adaptations ever made. The cinematography and set-pieces are phenomenal (the budget was $700 million) and the story of course is one of history's greats.Some stuff from the novel gets cut, and the "war" scenes are far more memorable than the "peace" parts, but the entire "Part Two," which focuses entirely on Natalie, would be a great romantic film entirely to itself.In short, it is like "The Leopard," "Gone with the Wind," Abel Ganz' "Napoleon," and "Spartacus" rolled into one masterpiece. However, I don't know that one could sit through this on DVD. But if you don't live in NY this week, I don't know when else you will have the chance to see it on the big screen, where it really is jaw-dropping.

I have only seen this film in the widely condemned Kultur pan-and-scan version with English subtitles, so I have not experienced it in its full wide-screen glory. But what I saw was a travesty of the novel. The novel combines a savagely satirical comedy of manners with an unsparing quest for moral truth. Bondarchuk and co. have reduced it to a Hollywood-style love story, essentially no different from the US version.The characters of Nikolai Rostov and Marya Bolkonskaya are reduced to bit parts, and Nikolai's relationship with Sonya vanishes. Crucial scenes are left out: e.g., Prince Andrei's visit to his father's abandoned estate and the entire narrative epilogue. So much for the film's vaunted faithfulness to the text. It is like a parrot reciting Shakespeare, only not funny.I suppose the tip-off is Bondarchuk's ludicrous casting of himself as Pierre. He was twice as old as the character, and it shows. Tikhonov as Prince Andrei looks the part. Savelyeva gives us Natasha's ugly-pretty aspect and ebullience, but the character's charisma did not come through to me. The girl is supposed to be jailbait, for heaven's sake.The film is a Soviet hack-job. If you enjoyed the novel, don't waste your time and money on this.

War and Peace is a tremendous film, and an undertaking which will never be rivaled. Bondarchuk secures a spot for all time in adapting, directing, and acting in this giant spectacle. Its in my top 50 greatest films of all time, perhaps top 25, and I have had the privilege of seeing many masterpieces.It is a film though, not with out its flaws. I think that War and Peace is a film that any filmmaker should watch and use as a guideline of what to do...and what not to do. First, the flaws: Bondarchuk lingers too much, much of the film is poetry, but one can only take so many shots of trees and the sky, and the battle that is part III is just far too long, when its intention is to show us the chaos of war, as viewed by Pierre-so there is no real development to the battle, its just random chaos carried over the course of 78 minutes-and that equals far too many overhead shots and shots of the legs of horses. The scene is spectacular, but for what it is trying to convey, it could have been done just as effectively in 40. I have no problem with the overall length of the movie, I just wish that more of the length was used to expand on existing characters or add other ones left out from the novel; rather than all of these aerial shots and shots of trees, and people looking off into space. Like Cy Young, even with all of its flaws, this film has twice as many shinning victories. It gets better as it goes on, and parts III and IV are definitely the best and most spectacular parts of the film. The battle from part II is nothing compared to the one in part III, and the burning of Moscow is a candidate for the most spectacular scene ever filmed. Bondarchuk does so much right in this film, I don't know where to start, but one thing I will note is that this is no boring by the letters film. While Bondarchuk would have benefited from a Hollywood cameraman, what he achieves here is simply amazing, and I must thank him for being so experimental. Sure, a lot of the experiments don't work all that well, and have aged a bit, but the ones that work, work marvelously, and it keeps the film fresh. This film would have been much poorer if it were made like "Gettysburg", or in the manner of your standard movie, because with a running time of nearly 7 hours, this film demands innovation and freshness.In the end this film is a monument of the medium. Not the most perfect film, but undeniably one of the greatest, and a must see for every movie lover.