Beautifully Disturbing

Rating: 8/10 (8 March 2001)

Like `Saving Private Ryan', `Enemy at the Gates' starts off forcing the viewer to bear witness to some beautifully disturbing battle scenes. In `Ryan', American soldiers are dying at the hands of the Germans. In `Enemy', Russian soldiers are dying at the hands of the Germans and Russians, whose twisted idea of human expendability causes them to shoot any soldier who turns back. By removing the `Ryan'-style rah-rah patriotism in the first fifteen minutes, this movie earns credibility in my book.
The storyline begins with Vassily Zaitsev (Jude Law), an adept marksman, saving the lives of himself and Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) by gunning down an unsuspecting group of German officers. A friendship forms, and Danilov soon after describes Vassily as a Russian hero in the propaganda he authors. Vassily, as a newly promoted sniper, becomes a national icon and draws the attention of the Germans. Reasonably, they suspect that killing Vassily would demoralize the Russian forces and send their star sniper, Major Koenig, played by famously blue-eyed Ed Harris, to stop Vassily. The movie becomes an edge-of-the-seat game of cat and mouse and even manages to work in the requisite love story, with Tania (Rachel Weisz) as the interest.
Some have been critical of this film because the sniper rivalry is rumored to be fictionalized, and understandably, since the film is a multi-national effort, one would hope for an accurate history lesson in the process. I am unsure of these criticisms, but I am sure that the film, though long , is a well-done look at an often forgotten war front. The actors all put in stellar performances, but perhaps Ed Harris, as the cunning and calm German, takes the cake. Fans of war films based largely on words unsaid like `The Thin Red Line' and `Apocalypse Now' will find this movie more of the bubble gum variety, but this, in my opinion, does not detract from the film's quality.