The mark of a true soldier

The mark of a true soldier is through their acts of selflessness. Alyosha spends the entirety of Ballad of a Soldier on leave, trying to make it back to his village to see his mother with the short amount of time he’s been assigned, and not for one second does he hang up the call of his duty, even if it means sacrificing his own time for the sanctity of others simply trying to get by over the course of his journey home.

I’ve gotten to this stage in my movie-watching journey where I feel as if I’ve seen everything that could possibly resonate with me deeply, and this nihilistic attitude admittedly has deterred me from watching movies as much as I used to. But then every once in a while I see a film like Ballad of a Solider which flips this stupid attitude of mine completely, and reminds me that there still is an ocean’s worth of resonant cinema for me to see, for Ballad of a Soldier truly is one of the most heartbreakingly noble cinematic depictions of sacrifice and duty I’ve ever seen, and there’s very few movies in the war genre which depicts these ideas so intimately.