The best war movie I've seen in the last few years.

Rating: 9/10 (3 April 2001)

The actual reason I went to see "Enemy at the Gates", was because of a friend who is a fanatical J.R.R Tolkien fan and wanted to see the "Lord of the Rings" trailer which he knew was going to be played before the movie. As for the movie itself, I had heard it being described in the Media as an interesting example of how European productions can be as spectacular as American ones, but I had no real urge to see it, as I am not a war movie fan, and furthermore, knowing the history of the Second World War quite well, I feel a certain sadness when viewing a recreation of scenes of death and drama that have actually taken place. Still, I have come to admire Jean-Jacques Annaud after watching "The Name of the Rose" but mostly for his less famous film "The Bear", which I saw as a child and had moved me deeply. Moreover, a cast including actors like Jude Law, Joseph Fiennes, Bob Hoskins, and mostly, Ed Harris, seemed to guarantee that the film wasn't going to be a flop.
I actually found the movie very good. The characters were well-structured and interesting, the performances of the actors were very good, with Ed Harris being an excellent, awe-inspiring figure as the German sniper, the scenery was impressive, the war scenes were few but spectacular and realistic, and the scenes of the sniper duels were undoubtedly the most exciting of the movie. Still, for some reason, many people, including most of those that posted in this column, didn't seem to have liked the movie.
Concerning the love story, I must agree that it was a little naive and perhaps at some points became tiring, but it never was annoying and it was stressed just enough to give a romantic feeling without overwhelming the movie's war element at any point. All in all, I found it necessary for the movie's completeness. Concerning historical accuracy, the real events were widely distorted, of course, but it is this slight distortion of history that separates a good war movie from a bad documentary. As for the language issue, with the Russians talking with British accents, a fact which many people found annoying, it did seem awkward in some points, as my friend commented during the movie, but I think it was a right choice on behalf of Annaud. The story was mainly told from the Soviet side, and if the central characters spoke subtitled Russian it would be too alienating and tiring, while if they spoke English with Russian accents it would be too cheap and silly, reminding us of naive American action movies like "Rambo". In fact, Jude Law's English-farm-boy accent was very fitting with Vassili Zaitsev's Soviet-country-boy character, while Joseph Fiennes' accent was very fitting to the low-class intellectual he was impersonating. After all, don't forget that the more decent movies featuring Soviets as the main characters, like "Gorky Park" or "Hunt of the Red October", have them speaking with British accents. As for commissar Danilov's final acceptance of the imperfection of the socialist system, which many people saw as a hint against communism, I find it a simple and fair acknowledgment of the fact that Stalin (and his various successors) was no better than Hitler.
The violence and killing in "Enemy at the Gates" were realistic and dramatic without being disgusting and aiming in shocking the spectator through sheer brutality as in "Saving Private Ryan". Furthermore, although both movies view the Germans as the villains of the story, Annaud's characters are deeper and more human, as he shows that both camps had good people as well as evil people, focusing on the drama of war, as opposed to Spielberg's intolerable approach of presenting the Germans as a swarm of brutal and mindless monsters, something close to the Indians in the mid-war westerns or the aliens of "Independence Day". In short, I found "Enemy at the Gates" not only a worthwhile European production, but the best war movie of the last few years and one of the finest World War II-theme war films ever made.