Soap Opera in Stalingrad

Rating: Null/10 (17 March 2001)

**SPOILERS**Enemy at the Gates is a film with a lot of potential. The production design is spectacular. The sets and costumes are terrific. While watching it, I really felt like I was seeing the hell-on-earth that Stalingrad must have been during the epic siege of 1942-3. Mr. Annaud definitely got his 80 million dollars worth. I was particularly impressed that they bought some actual Mk III panzer tanks and Soviet t-34s--a nice touch. However, no amount of money or production artistry can save a movie with a lame story, and Enemy at the Gates suffers in this regard.
As I sat in the theater, I was struck with puzzlement. How could anyone take an event as inherently dramatic as the epic struggle for Stalingrad and make it boring? It's simple: for starters, shoot your battle scenes from the sidelines as confused jumbles that don't evoke much emotion or add much to the plot. There are individual shots that work well, but they just seem thrown together, and only end up hammering home that war is brutal with a capital B and tragic with a capital T without gelling the film together into something more meaningful.
Another thing that should of worked, but didn't, was the duel between the snipers. The filmmakers meant to show their personal fight as a kind of battle in microcosm. An epic duel happening in tandem with the duel of nations in the city. But there's no suspense! They telegraph *every* dueling scene before it happens. It would have been cool to have Jude Law walk into a ruined factory and get shot at. Then, along with him, we could try to find out where the evil Ed Harris is hiding along with Jude Law. Never once do they do this in the movie! We always see where Ed Harris is hiding before Jude Law steps into a trap...and vice versa. Always-always-always! Boring boring boring!!!
Half the time, we know where the snipers are going to be because they tell someone that there's going to be a trap 10 minutes before the scene even happens! "I'll surprise Vasily at the perfect spot in the train station," Ed Harris tells his way-too-cute Russian boy informant. And then he does. The only thing suprising here is that in a Sniper movie, they give all the surprises away.
Even worse, the characters aren't well developed, and poor Ed Harris is forced to sit around looking cold and sinister, drinking champagne and smoking evil gold tipped cigarettes, which he leaves as his "calling card" for Jude Law to find. Harris' Major Konig is just another cold calculating movie villain, without much real depth. He's like sho kosugi the ninja in "The Octagon" or something. For a better "clash of the titans" see the duel at the end of "Predator". At least Awnold emotes in that one.
WARNING - SPOILER AHEAD Finally, You'd think two people falling in love in a place like Stalingrad would be gripping and tragic, because sooner or later one of them is going to get killed. There is no better example of finding love at the wrong place and the wrong time. So how does this movie screw up it's love story? By making it a phony soap opera love triangle between the lovers (the handsome farmboy Vasily and lovely tough intellectual Tanya), and the standard jealous intellectual (Danilov). This has been done a million times before in a million pretentious art films, and it's been done better. It's phony and contrived when it didn't have to be. Not even James Horner's relentlessly "You-are-watching-something-tragically-Russian-kind-of-like-Dr-Zhivago-but-n ot-as-good" love theme could rescue this sappy love story from it's contrived, manipulative trappings.
The plot is riddled with lots more holes because the script here is just poorly written. Usually this plays out by having battles or explosions occur just in time to let characters escape being killed, or by having characters stuck in a huge ruined city just happen to bump into each other to convieniently overhear each other talking, or other such lame manipulative tricks. Enough said. This could have been a good movie, but too bad about the lame plot.