No one soldier made a difference on the field of battle. Fortunately, Enemy at the Gates itself makes no such suggestion. It's a slightly more sophisticated film than that. It argues that, even if they're not truly necessary to win a modern war, people need heroes. Countries need heroes.
Heroes do exist.
It argues that, even if regimes are vicious and corrupt, battles can still be worth fighting. Influenced by both Titanic and Saving Private Ryan , Enemy at the Gates is a story of individual conflicts and love affairs set against the backdrop of a horrible, tragic battle. Like Titanic , Enemy at the Gates features a possibly ill-fated romance between people from different worlds thrown together by circumstance. Like Saving Private Ryan , Enemy at the Gates opens with a segment that unflinchingly examines the shockingly brutal battleground instead of glorifying it. Oddly, given how stories are usually rewritten for movies, historical records show that the sniper duel is almost certainly fiction, while the love affair is a true story, give or take a Hollywood ending.