Very intense, but typical Hollywood script.

Rating: 7/10 (28 April 2004)

A really intense and outstanding movie, sadly it has Hollywood written all over it, you are never in doubt of the ending and it all the way through feels sort of predictable, which removes a bit of the intensity, though not all.
Vassili Zaitsev is a rookie, raised on the country by his granddad he is send to Stalingrad to fight the most important fight of WW2, there are many soldiers among him, not all are given a rifle, in the first run at the germans Vassili is one of the only survivors from the hit, here he finds a rifle among the dead and snipers 5 german soldiers, watched by a political newspaper guy who turns him into a hero. From Germamy arives the master sniper, König, to put an end to Vasilli's rampage killings of highly placed german officers, the Duell has begun.
Enemy At the Gates gives a very good portrait of the war, the evil side too, this has been done many times before, WW2 has and will always be a solid and interesting theme for making movies, the genius lies in picking up a Sub Theme of this that is still interesting, but also original, becuase many things has been seen before, this is a movie that focuses on something that hasn't been made a known movie about before, the Duell between the snipers.
This movie is really well done, and you can see that every detail has been gone over and analyzed, this movie is really well put together, sadly the script isn't as well done as the movie itself, from outside the movie sounds very original considering it's a WW2 movie, however once you get going, you can very easily in the movie say that this movie was made in hollywood, the script is predictable, and for some reason it tries to combine the intense WW2 drama, with an intriguing love story. If the love story is true or not, i don't know, but never the less it makes the movie part ways early, intensity moving to one direction, while the romantic side story movies in the opposide direction, the purpose is to cross each others read in the end, and it does, and it's spotted after 30 minutes within the movie, however i must say that the love part of the movie has both it's good sides and bad sides, at first i was annoyed that they had to import a love story into a dramatic and intense war movie. However, it succeeds without destroying the dramatic point of the movie too much, it's more the predictability of the movie that makes for a less intense part here, not saying it's boring, becuase it's so well done that it can only be exhiting, however if i didn't already know that he was bound to survive to safe the happy end, i would have been chewing my nails on every Duell.
One of the most amazing parts of this movie is the unbelivable realistic and detailed re-creation of Stalingrad during the war, this is one of the more convincing sides of the movie, and it really makes a good background for a realistic WW2 movie, it's obvious that the scenery has been done down to the very last detail, it looks really outstanding. Also the cinematography of the movie is really great, and the opening scene when they enter Stalingrad from the water is very well done, appears to be a scene inspired by the "boarding the beach" scene in Saving Private Ryan, but never the less it looks great and the parts where the planes are gunning at the boats is terrificly made.
The directing of this movie is well done, however i wouldn't characterize the directing perfect, as i think any experienced director could have made this movie as it is made, he had all the necesarry funds to build a great re-creation, the fantastic re-creation is not something we should thank the Diretor for, it's nothing extraordinary, but still a good direction.
One thing that surprised me in this movie was Jude Law's great acting, i've always seen him as a bit shallow and without debth of realism, but in this movie he really does a great job and makes the movie more belivable, furthermore it's his stone face in the sniping scenes i think that makes for much of the intensity, he's playing a very serious chracter, and he succeds. The other main actors and actresses also does a great job, however they're not shining as much as Jude Law is, he is the one that makes the other performances fade a little to the background.
To sum it all up, this is indeed a good movie, at times breathtaking and intense, other times a little hard to understand and too predictable, but it's still a solid movie, good entertainment, and definetely worth checking out if war dramas is a genre that interests you.
7/10