There is nothing worse than good material gone to waste.

Rating: Null/10 (30 October 2001)

This could have been one of the great war movies of the new millennium.
The pacing was uneven in that as soon as there is some tension building during the sniper or love triangle sequences, the ball is dropped and we're running off to a different scene. You got the feeling the director felt that there was too much material to cover too little time so let's not stay in one place too long.
There didn't seem to be enough time for any character development to keep me interested. There was absolutely no tension in the love triangle. It was just flat. The Blue Max comes to mind as a film that accomplished this successfully and also in two other areas! You felt all the tension of a war between two armies, two sexes, and two social classes. It can be done.
Turning to Koenig which could have been a much more interesting character study, Ed Harris never pushed the envelope to peek into Koenig's personality.
I was turned off by the action of him hanging the boy which I felt would have been beneath the character. I felt I was being preached to by the producers in a "politically correct" way so they made sure I knew who the bad guys were. Duh.
The film score borrowed a little too much from Shindlers List.
The only great thing about this movie is that it had the "look". I mean you are there, especially on the big screen. There's nothing worse than a WWII movie of a winter battle, looking like it was shot in southern California.
The final cat and mouse scene was lukewarm at best tension wise. The director should have looked at the sniper scene in the film Anzio which was one of the best I've ever seen even if the rest of the movie was horrible.
Enemy at the Gates tried to cater to the Saturday night date crowd by being a great war movie and a great love story. It was neither.