Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
Writers: Jean-Jacques Annaud and Alain Godard
Producer: Jean-Jacques Annaud, Alain Godard, Roland Pellegrino, Jörg Reichl, John D. Schofield, Alisa Tager
Studio: Paramount (US)
Major Stars: Jude Law, Ed Harris, Bob Hoskins, Rachel Weisz, Ron Perlman, Jospeh Fiennes
Enemy At The Gates is a film that looks good and has some really fantastic moments. But its average script and complete disregard for reality drag it down well below where it should rank.
The story is a simple one. During the brutal Battle of Stalingrad during World War Two, Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law) is conscripted into the Red Army and sent to fight in the battle. He survives his initial taste of war and proves himself handy with a rifle. So handy, in fact, that he gets promoted to the sniper division and makes a name for himself killing German officers. They respond by sending Major Erwin König (Ed Harris), an accomplished sniper himself, to take Zaitsev out. And that is the basic spine of the story.
Let’s get the accolades out of the way first. The cinematography of the film is really something to appreciate. Whether it is the hellish crossing of the Volga River or the barren landscape where the two snipers stalk each other, the look of the movie is great. Kudos to Robert Fraisse on a job well done. He has had an interesting career. He started shooting soft-core (Story of O, Lady Chatterley's Lover) but also lensed Ronin and Hotel Rwanda. He even won an Oscar in 1992 for The Lover. Go figure
Law and Harris play their roles really well. Law portrays Zaitsev as a simple peasant who doesn’t want to be where he is but recognizes that he is good at what he does and that it serves a larger purpose. Harris is excellent as König, nailing that icy arrogance the Prussian officers in the German military always seemed to possess. He is willing to hang children to draw out Zaitsev and that didn’t seem to be a stretch for the character.
And the opening sequence is just jaw-dropping. The bombing of Stalingrad and the soldiers crossing the Volga to a burning Stalingrad, while being strafed and bombed by Stuka dive-bombers, is amazing to behold. There was a reason that at the Soviets’ low point in Stalingrad, the average life expectancy of a new private was 24 hours
With all that said, there are some problems. First is the script. It’s not bad, but there is nothing memorable about it either. It kind of just sits there and gives the characters something to say as we kill time between the sniper duels. Can anyone really remember a memorable line from the movie? Or a specific block of dialogue? After watching it again, I still think it is an adequate script. It doesn’t kill the film but it doesn’t elevate it either.
But the larger problem is its disregard for what happened at Stalingrad. Now, I am not saying that it has to be historically accurate down to the last brick. But the movie should respect what happened and not ignore it. The film Stalingrad (which I'll review next) isn’t based on a real German unit, but it respects what happened there.
