Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Just outside Stalingrad, USSR, September 1942. A train is offloading civilians and loading soldiers of the Red Army for transport to the front. There is shouting and shoving and fear and desperation. The soldiers arrive at the front and must cross the Volga River to get into the city as the Germans shell, bomb, and strafe them. In the distance, smoke pours from the city and the flash and bang of explosions erupt all around. And you are there, or at least you’ll feel that you are during the opening sequence of Enemy at the Gates.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It captured the feel of the war in the spirit of Das Boot, Saving Private Ryan, and Stalingrad, both on a broad scale and on an individual level. Like Das Boot, Enemy is based partially in fact, here on Russian hero Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law), a sniper who racked up an impressive score of kills during the battle for Stalingrad. Of course, the story is spiced up a bit for the moviegoer with a fictional love triangle thrown in.

Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) is an intelligentsia political officer who discovers Vassili and makes a hero of him, a figure for the soldiers and citizens to rally around. He also becomes a rival with Vassili for the love of Tania (Rachel Weisz), a soldier in the Red Army herself.

At some points the love plot is comical, for example when Danilov brings Tania a fish as a demonstration of his affection. Of course, given the context of the story this makes sense, but when I saw the film the audience didn’t seem to take it that way. When Vassili ends up making love to Tania later in the film (no big surprise that he gets the girl), I joked to a friend he must have given her two fish.

The reality is that the love triangle is a distraction and never fully developed. The meat and potatoes around which this film is built is the duel between Vassili and Major Koenig (Ed Harris), a sniper of perhaps greater talent than Vassili, who is sent from Germany to put an end to Vassili’s sniper attacks and more importantly to demoralize the Soviets.

So do I like this movie? Yes I do, and for lots of reasons. For the most part, the acting is adequate to good. Law and Weisz are adequate to their parts, while Fiennes does a good job as Danilov. Harris is stony faced as Koenig, which is how the part must have been cast, but he comes off as dull and boring. You don’t like him, but you don’t hate him either. When he meets his demise at the end of the film its rather anticlimactic, his character just isn’t built up enough for us to cheer. I realize this film is attempting to be as realistic as possible, but it is fiction after all and a little imagination never hurts.

The real star in my book is Bob Hoskins as Nikita Khrushchev. He’s vibrant and convincing, and does a wonderful job of bringing this historical figure to life. We can easily believe this is the same Khrushchev who would go on to succeed Stalin and bang his shoe on the podium at the United Nations.

The effects are impressive, especially the opening attack on the boatloads of sailors trying to cross the Volga by Stuka dive-bombers. The planes come screaming from the sky, banshee sirens blaring out their deafening, blood curdling shrieks to strike terror into their victims. Some of the boats explode; others are torn up by machine gun fire. Later we see Heinkels bombing the ruins of the city, an equally impressive sight.

The battle scenes on the ground are well done, too. They’re bloody and realistic, and meant to show us what war is really like. The plight of the Russian soldier is pointed out graphically in one scene where a suicidal charge is ordered against a dug-in German position. The few survivors, upon retreat, ate cut down by NKVD (forerunners of the KGB) officers for being “cowards”.

The Russians aren’t made out to be heroes here, though they are the focus of the film and certainly cast in a brighter light than the Germans are. Ed Harris character, Major Koenig, is disappointingly shown to be a monster at the end of the film. He’s the only German character we get an insight into, and though killing is his profession, it’s Vassili’s too, though he is certainly not portrayed as the cold, calculating killer that Koenig is.

My one pet peeve is the fact that all the Soviet characters have English accents. No wonder the English had a rough time of it against Rommel, all of their best troops were in Russia. This seems to be happening a lot lately in movies. If you want to give a character a foreign air about him you cast an Englishman to play the part, no matter the country he’s supposed to be from. Even an attempt at a Russian accent here would have been convincing. The same goes for Harris, who makes no attempt at all at a German accent (though whenever he is surrounded by other Germans they speak that language unless they are in conversation with him).

Where the film really succeeds is in the depiction of the soldier as an individual, not as part of a platoon or division but as a man. What Stalingrad did to show us the face of the German soldier, Enemy does for the Russian soldier, trapped in circumstances he has no control over.

Enemy at the Gates is well worth your time. It will definitely be taking a place on my DVD shelf when it is released in that format.


Recommended: Yes

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older