good war picture

Rating: Null/10 (12 August 2001)

Jean-Jacques Annaud's `Enemy at the Gates' opens with an extended sequence depicting the 1942 Siege of Stalingrad that is almost as impressive, in its size, scope and battleground realism, as the Normandy Invasion scene in `Saving Private Ryan.'
Although `Enemy at the Gates' never again returns to this level of greatness, it does emerge as a pretty decent war movie, nonetheless. The film is based on the true story of a Soviet marksman, Sergeant Vassili Zaitsev, who finds himself - as much through fate and the efforts of an officer friend of his as through any act of bravery on his own part - suddenly thrust to the forefront as a national hero, a position created to bolster the fading morale of the Russian troops who are, at that moment, being mercilessly pounded by the Nazi war machine. So famous  and, thus, so much a threat to Nazi security - has Vassili become, that the Germans have even sent their greatest sniper, Major Konig, to find and dispatch him.
Thus, the film becomes at times a fascinating depiction of a cat-and-mouse duel of wits between two evenly matched antagonists both bent on the same outcome. Ed Harris plays Konig with all the steely-eyed intensity of a bloodthirsty killer, as much driven by his need for personal triumph as his love of the greater cause. In contrast, Vassili is portrayed as an almost reluctant hero, a man who would gladly relinquish the burden placed on him if circumstances could be different. Part of the fascination of his character rests in the struggle Vassili undergoes as he tries to reconcile the heroic image of himself as portrayed in the newspapers with the all-too-human man of flesh and blood he knows himself to be. Jude Law, despite his grating and wholly anachronistic English accent, underplays his role nicely, as does Joseph Fiennes, as Commissar Danilov, the Marxist idealist who comes up with the plan of turning Vassili's acts into the stuff of legend.
In addition to covering an aspect of World War II that has long gone untouched by moviemakers until now, `Enemy at the Gates' provides us with an interesting plot - even though, at 130 minutes, it does tend to fall into a dramatic monotony every now and then. Furthermore, the film is saddled with a romantic triangle of such surpassing banality that it threatens to reduce the movie in the final scenes to as great a pile of rubble as those we see so skillfully created by the set designer. Speaking of which, the single greatest element of this film is clearly its meticulously mounted imagery of both chaotic battle scenes and the burned out remains of a devastated war torn city. Kudos go out to all the film's technical people, its production designer, art directors, set decorator, editors, cinematographer, special effects technicians etc. They have done a truly monumental job on this film. Only James Horner's score turns out to be a bit problematic, since the first ten or so notes of the recurring main theme sound exactly like John Williams' work from `Schindler's List.'
Yet, `Enemy at the Gates,' though not a perfect film, has much to offer in terms of its plot, its performances and, above all, its grand visual style. For that last aspect alone, the film should not be missed.