There are two films wrapped up in this one. The first could have been a powerful character study of the realities of the Soviet advance through Germany. It could have shown how the excitement of nationalism gave way to the harsh reality of war with friends lost and lives destroyed.The second, a sub-standard cold war spy thriller, could've been left as a thirty minute radio play judging from the poor voice-over narration that was going on.The acting from the segments set in the 1960s is poor at best and littered with third-rate clichés around torture, disaffected communists and secret codes. To make matters worse an interracial love story is thrown in and handled with all the style of a wet lettuce.In the 1940s segments there's some reasonable acting going which suffers from not enough time to develop the characters and rather bland lighting and filming. There isn't a sense of grittiness or realism to help build the story.Overall a wasted opportunity.

I watched this mini-epic in a hotel in Abu Dhabi four years ago. I recently picked it up on DVD as I fancied watching again to see if it was as powerful as I remembered; it was! I see from wiki the story was inspired by the book "Berlin the Downfall 1945" by Antony Beevor (to some extent at least) which, although the film is not set in Berlin but in Silesia, does make a lot of sense. I applaud the way the film shows the destruction, defeat, reconstruction, then re-emergence of identity, of a nation – through the transformation of a teenage boy into adult life. Aside from the frighteningly realistic combat, the horrific gang-rapes, and the depiction of an all-colourful swinging sixties London – a major feature that struck me on my second viewing was that the success of Thomas' journey (the journey of the German nation, personified as a sensitive male) is only made possible by his involvement with females. This I found interesting and quite unusual. Melanie (his first true love) sacrifices herself so that he may live another day; Astrid (the refugee nurse) gets him out of the front-lines and instructs him to toughen up; Tanya (the Russian tank-girl) takes him from the gutter of the occupied zone to a military school in Russia; Stephanie (the East-German spy) informs the KGB that he has defected – the most complex of all his female 'helpers'; and Yvonne (the black Mod girl) gives him affectionate love and inspires him to develop. All in all, extremely deep and layered material and much more contextual than most war-spy films. It made me wonder if it had originally been written as a novel.

clumsy and heavy handed...I wanted more London and less flashback and the narrative just doesn't work. The rape scenes are really unnecessary and add nothing to the story. Less telling and more showing would have helped this movie. The more I watched the more I fast forwarded through the WW2 scenes (which is weird for me) and shot to the spy / intrigue elements. Funnily enough though after the movie and I had gone our separate ways I still enjoyed the redeeming features, namely, the concepts tackled in the movie - loyalty, the past, control and freedom. Hey who thought to the put the SAME surf rock song in the girlfriend London scenes? Whacky...

In 1944, the fourteen years old teenager Thomas (Tom Schilling) is convoked to fight in the German Army. He survives, but his town is destroyed, his family dies in a bombing and his sweetheart Melanie (Bernadette Heerwagen) is raped and murdered by the Russian Army. A Commissar brings the orphan Thomas to Soviet Union, and he is sent to the military school. Years later, Thomas (Ed Stoppard) becomes an agent of KGB and in 1962, during the Cold War, he is assigned to work in London. Living with ghosts from the past in constant fear and paranoia, he meets the black Londoner Yvonne (Michelle Gayle), who gives him the strength of joy."Joy Division" is a movie with an engaging and very cruel drama of war, and a confused spy story in times of Cold War. If the story was limited to the impressive situation of the survivors of the Russian invasion, it would be excellent. But the part of espionage never works and is a complete mess. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "Regras da Guerra" ("Rules of the War")