Very good, but nothing to do with history

Rating: Null/10 (18 March 2003)

Enemy at the gates. Good movie. I liked it. Sad, but true - never could be even close to "Iron cross"(Cross of iron). Actually the film is very well made, but there are some mistakes. First of all when WWII starts Vasilij Zaicev is a sergeant in the Red army and not just a private. He was not a nature talent. He was first in a sniper school. Actually he is known as one of the best snipers in the world's history with an impressive list of 242 (two hundre fourty two) shot german officers. Wow. Of course his duel with the german sniper is a fiction. So is his love with Tania. It's just a story. How ends Vasilii's sniper career? Few months before the end of the war he gets shot in the head. The wound is very bad. Once the doctors save him, they find out, that there is a danger for him losing his left eye - the bullet almost had cut off the nerves. He gets lucky - he survives the wound, and even his eye recovers. Not like before, regretfully. His sniper days are over and he receivs a place in a sniper school, training young soldiers how to be killing mashines, like he was before. This i's V. Zaicev' story, his real story I mean and since you have probably seen the film, you already know that it's just Hollywood crap, especially the ending - (there is no any dry eye in the cinema). Despite that, the movie was good. The war scenes - briliant. An officer shooting the soldiers tring to scape by jumping in the ice-cold Moscau river. The polit-officers shooting the soldiers trying to retreat. The german aviation on a raid over the river or the city. Stalingrad was a city of industry without any fortifications. Sometimes the distance between german and soviet troops was less then 20 meters (about 7 feet). There were no any war manoevers in the movie and Stalingrad is actually the point break for the germans. That's where they actually start losing the war. No one really thought that the winter invasion would bo so prolonged. Anyway the movie is not about the siege, it's about the two snipers. The acting - Feins, Law, Harris - briliant as usual. Hm, by the way - major Kionig says to a german soldier about a POW: "I hope he is still able to talk!"- nice, compassion to the courageous enemy. He suffers also his son, died in battle. But in the end he doesn't have any remorse when he decides to hang a little kid, when the information he got from the same kid served him very well. Strange, right? Anyway. Briliant camera work, great acting, good story (although nothing to do with reality and history) - so enjoy it:)) I did.