Sekretnoe oruzhie

It was the worst Russian war movie I've ever seen. It's terrible in every possible way. Acting is so bad so You may think, that You're watching war movie parody. But it's not parody. Seriously. Screenplay is extremely dumb and for people with that intelect level only. The best thing in this movie is camerawork, which is mediocre. The worst - Stalin-like Soviet propaganda, which shows NKVD murderers as heroes. This movie is not just waste of time. It's detrimental.

A mid-budget film that squanders its financial and technical resources in a cinematography that is lacking in all aspects. The performances of the lead actors are rather mediocre and hardly believable. The film's plot itself is implausible; in fact, the Katiusha missile launcher has never been a top-secret weapon suitable for a sabotage operation. The Katiusha launcher is nothing more than a truck with some rails, so it's not worth sacrificing so many human lives. It would be another matter if we were talking about the Katiusha missiles themselves, which did have cutting-edge technology for their time, but none of these missiles are seen here.

It's strange that in 2019 a film like this was produced with such resources and that they were so poorly utilized. The music is completely absent, the photography is very mediocre, with an overuse of slow-motion shots. At times, one wonders if this is an amateur film or something made for TV, but in reality, it's simply a poorly directed movie. The direction lacks precision and fails to make the most of the technical and human resources available. It's not that the actors are bad; they are actors who have not been used to their full potential.

The narrative is also quite poor; there are some attempts at psychological depth, but they remain just that, mere attempts. The post-production of explosion and gunfire effects is also rather lackluster, despite the fact that nowadays, with CGI, these effects are readily available in any production. I'm inclined to think that there were organizational problems that caused this film's production to go awry, which is a shame.

So "Secret Weapon" is a new Soviet war fim about a group of soldiers sent behind the german lines to destroy a secret weapon now in possession of the germans (the weapon is the katusha rocket launcher). The trailer for this movie is great--the film is a waste of time to watch. With no backstory a russian solder is taken from jail and put in command of a group sent to get the secret weapon back or desttroy it. The dialogue, dubbing and plot of the movie quickly unravel and start not making sense. Their are battle scenes where the germans fall down dead if the russians merely take the safety catch off their rifles and lots of slow scenes where the soldiers talk about home and their families. A similar but actually quite good russian film from 2002 called "The Star" covers the same ground as Secret Weapon but does it way better than this film. My favorite scene in Secret Weapon which took it from bad to ridiculous was when one soldier orders another to collect firewood and the 2nd soldier's response is "your way too bold dude"--no I'm not kidding. I don't think "dude" was part of the russian vocabulary in 1943 but I could be wrong.

"Secret Weapon" 2019. It's a really good movie, and it's free on YouTube. I have no idea why everyone is beating it up so. The acting is one notch below great. The story is awesome. There is a lot of heart felt stuff going on. Patriots dying for their cause. Girl rebels getting hung by the Germans. Men sacrificing their own lives for their comrades. Blowing up bridges. There's hand grenades, land mines, and a fair amount of shooting. All that good stuff. I ain't kidding. This movie is better than "Green Berets" or as good as any of the war pictures. And, oh yeah, it's sad and tragic. // The Bushwacker 10/3/2021.