Enemy at the Gates

After watching such films as "Saving Private Ryan" and "Patton;" I have come to appreciate war films. For this reason, I decided to see the latest war film, "Enemy At The Gates."

"Enemy At The Gates" may be one of the best war films I have seen since "Saving Private Ryan" because it is executed perfectly. With incredible performances, script and the impact I felt; "Enemy At The Gates" sets the tone as the first great war film of the 22nd century. This film can be served as the appetizer to the main course coming out soon, "Pearl Harbor."

Jude Law, Joseph Feinnes, Rachel Weisz, Ed Harris and Bob Hoskins come together to re-visit the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942. The best thing about seeing each one of the actors perform was they all gave 100 percent effort to make the film as real as possible; they did an excellent job. Fiennes, Weisz and Hoskins were the icing to a cake that was delicious from the start.

The highlights of "Enemy At The Gates" always came when Law and Harris were on screen because they played excellent psychological mind games with one another to win; furthermore, it was like watching master chess players playing for the grand prize. It was also enjoyable to see the strategies and tactics each would use to out-maneuver the other.

"Enemy At The Gates" drew me with its many action sequences similar to those in "Saving Priate Ryan." Also, the love triangle between the three main leads was interesting to watch and see how it would unfold. I felt like I was in the movie because the writer did an excellent job at making me feel exactly what they felt and experience what they were going through.

There is no rule that states dialogue is needed for a successful film. While "Enemy At The Gates" has dialogue, the scenes that have none stand out in my mind the most because we see close-ups of both snipers and the expressions on their faces. This is incredible to me because the intensity shown on their faces speaks volumes about what the movie is really about.

This may not be the best war film ever made but with two of the brightest young stars on the rise, an actress that is here to stay and a veteran that continues to turn in knock-out performances, "Enemy At The Gates" will be remembered for a long time.

If you go into this film hoping for an historically accurate portrayal of the battle of Stalingrad then go watch a documentary, if you are however looking to be entertained by an action packed and gritty WW2 movie set in the city of Stalingrad, then go ahead and pick this up because it's nothing if not entertaining.

The movie is about the real life sniper Vasily Zaitsev played by Jude Law and his exploits during the famous battle, the beginning of the movie is complete chaos as our main hero is sent to the front and we see the besieged and infamous city for the first time. It's honestly worth watching this movie just for the opening scene alone which is just incredibly well done in all aspects and portrays some of the horrors that the soviet troops would have witnessed when arriving there.

Overall this is a highly entertaining war movie, fantastic CGI for the time, everything is well shot, the set pieces are gorgeous and even the acting and characters are well done.

All that said this is of course a Hollywood production, don't expect much in the way of historical accuracy and definitely expect a silly love story (though not the worst) and everyone speaking English with poor Russian and German accents.

It's the fall of 1942. Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law) grew up hunting with his father in the woods. He, Tania (Rachel Weisz) and countless other untrained recruits are brought up to the front at Stalingrad. He and Commisar Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) survive a suicidal charge. Vassili kills 5 Germans in the aftermath and Danilov writes about him. Nikita Khrushchev (Bob Hoskins) seizes the opportunity to make him a star. Opposing him is the aristocratic German sniper Major König (Ed Harris).

The opening is an amazing opera of mass destruction. Then it's a matter of a chess game. It's a fascinating cat and mouse game in the ruins of the city. I'm glad that nobody decided to talk in a fake Russian accent. That would be too distracting. This is a rare good American war movie not about Americans.

In the grand tradition of Old Hollywood, this international co-production seeks to frame the key battle of WW2 (the REAL key battle, not the ones from the John Wayne movies) as a morality tale involving a love triangle.

It is a bold idea, and beautifully executed.

In fact an argument could be made -- and I will make it -- that any flaws in the execution (it lags a bit here and there) are the result of the film-makers' "reach exceeding their grasp" and they attempted too much, more than one film could ever accomplish.

But what a film it is! You viewer feel as though you are there, making history. The four stars involved have, each of them, never given a bad performance in their careers and they surely maintain their records here.

Ed Harris in particular -- although he has less screen time -- will always to this reviewer seem a vastly under-rated actor. (This review written in 2017 where an older Harris still uses his charisma in a defining role for HBOs Westworld .... and nails it.) Recommended? Absolutely! In the Metacritic data that IMDb so helpfully provides I could not help but notice one reviewer commenting that, well, it sure isn't in the same class as SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.

Which is the irony of doing film reviews. I have never not once thought of wanting to see SAVING PRIVATE RYAN again, but this film is one I like to revisit every few years. Magnificent.

No doubt the title is an indication of what the film would LIKE to be about. The Germans forces were indeed "at the gates" - they are on the verge of capturing Stalingrad, they would lay siege to Leningrad, and at one point even Moscow appeared to be in danger. The situation was desperate. But after we're told all this, the position of the German army turns out to have no more to do with the story than the position of the sun in the zodiac. After a bitter, violent battle over - well, we're never told - nothing of a military nature happens again. Not even offstage. (Until the end, when, after a brief "offensive" of unfathomable significance, an epilogue tells us that the Germans were repelled from after all.) All the action in Stalingrad freezes so that we can watch a protracted duel between a Russian and a German sniper.

Now I'm prepared to believe that snipers played a valuable role in this kind of warfare - I wouldn't know - but Vassili's primary value, we must assume in the absence of information to the contrary, is as propaganda - a means of keeping up the morale of the local troops. But there's something circular here. The snipers are the only people we see doing any actual fighting, and by the end of the film they seem to be devoting all their efforts to shooting a German sniper who is in turn doing nothing but trying to shoot Vassili. What does ANY of this have to do with, you know, the invasion?

The fact that the troops of a hostile foreign power are on Russian soil (they haven't yet been defeated, and it looks to be only a matter of time before even Moscow would be overrun) doesn't seem to motivate the characters to do much. Nobody makes a single decision for the good of the war effort as a whole. Danilov builds up the Vassili legend because of personal feelings and is ready to tear it down later for other personal reasons; Tania wants to kill Germans - kill them herself, by hand, rather than help her fellow soldiers as best she can by working in intelligence - because they killed her parents; Danilov tries to transfer her to a safer job not because that's where she should be (it's a mere coincidence that that IS where she should be), but because he's hitting on to her; Vassili's heart isn't in the duel with the German sniper until he has a casual acquaintance's death to avenge. When Sacha's mother is told that her son is a traitor (now serving the forces who have bombed the city she grew up in to rubble), her only reaction is, "Perhaps he'll be safer with them than with us." Wherever we look, we see dreary personal concerns. Did any of these people notice that the enemy IS at the gates?

If Anaud was trying to make his characters more plausible by making them pettier, he failed. When Sacha tells a third party what we supposedly already know - that Tania is in love with Vassili - it came as news to me. I hadn't seen any insipient love anywhere. I suppose I ought to have worked it out, by assuming that the single female character must be there to fall in love with someone and using a process of elimination to work out who it was (she plainly didn't care for one of the two candidates, therefore she must be head over heels with the other one), but really, even in a movie as dull as this, I have better things to do.