Good but not Great

Rating: Null/10 (19 April 2001)

I like war movies, and I liked this war movie. It seems that WWII movies are making a bit of a comeback (I'm really looking forward to "Pearl Harbor"), and I'm glad to see it. Starting with Saving Private Ryan, it's good to see that war movies are starting to become more historically and graphically correct. Old war movies were a joke, showing hundreds of deaths in battles, but not a single drop of blood. This new crop of war movies really gets in your face, shows you the hell that the soldiers endured, and shows what really happens when a bullet finds human flesh. It's not for the squeamish, but it's the truth.
This is what I expected to see in Enemy at the Gates, and It's what I did see. Sort-of.
---Minor Spoilers Ahead---
Though there were great battle scenes, the movie didn't really center on the battle itself, it centered on the duel between the crackerjack Russian sniper and propaganda hero, Zaitsev, and the German sniper sent to silence him, Konings. The cat-and-mouse (or maybe cat-and-cat, they both had rifles after all) battles of cunning between Zaitsev and Konings were fascinating, but they started to become tiresome after a while, the movie started to drag on a bit, and the ending was disappointing, it was what I called a "Star Trek ending". Why? Because in the series "Star Trek" (the newer one with Patrick Stewart, that is), the episodes always spent most of the time building up this big problem, making a huge deal about it, and then the problem is solved in like, two minutes. One of the crew pushes a button and it's all over, problem solved. Basically this movie ends in a similar manner, with the abruptness of a switch being thrown into the "off" position.
And finally, I was so disappointed that they had to throw the obligatory love story in there. It's so cliche, and this one was poorly done. It was really pointless, and I think that it really detracted from the film. That's one thing I really liked about "Saving Private Ryan", they didn't taint a serious war story with a two-bit soap opera.
All in all, I did like it, but it fell a little short of my expectations.