Aims between the eyes, but misses the mark.

''I've been such a fool, Vassili. Man will always be a man. There is no new man. We tried so hard to create a society that was equal, where there'd be nothing to envy your neighbour. But there's always something to envy. A smile, a friendship, something you don't have and want to appropriate. In this world, even a Soviet one, there will always be rich and poor. Rich in gifts, poor in gifts. Rich in love, poor in love.''

Two Russian and German snipers play a game of cat-and-mouse during the Battle of Stalingrad.

Jude Law: Vassili Zaitsev

It begins like a Saving Private Ryan rendition of sorts, bludgeoning us with narration, story and images of war, depicting a grizzly reality of turmoil. Now I was impressed with the opening scenes of battle, the random fighting we essentially seem to be thrown into.
As Enemy at the Gates continues, we get characters thrown together without any explanation or reason. It just happens repeatedly in an array of events, that seem to defy believability.
This being a Russian story, a Soviet tale, it does succeed in being a strange re-telling of history. The Russian Communist soldiers are depicted as expendable morsels, whom strangely all speak English, in strange ways. They shoot soldiers who retreat but don't have enough guns for all their people. Does this make sense? Clearly not. If they spent all that energy actually fighting the enemy rather than attacking their own grunts then they would of actually speeded up defeating the enemy.

Writer/Director Jean-Jacques Annaud, writer Alain Goddard, and cinematographer Robert Fraisse treat the subject matter with confusing strokes of bizarreness and splatterings of action and fighting. It's very tricky to capture certain aspects and some parts feel like they have mixed messages as to why they are taking place. Anyone who's read anything credible about the inhuman suffering the Russian soldiers endured during this battle will have no trouble filling in the gaps that the narrative leaves about their living conditions. The blood and gore shown during the battles is beneficial to the atmosphere. Rather than just expecting you to believe that a solider receives a bullet to the aforementioned head, they show you Nazi and Soviet heroes dealing out death and judgment, so we can relate to them.

''All these men here know they're going to die. So, each night when they make it back, it's a bonus. So, every cup of tea, every cigarette is like a little celebration. You just have to accept that.''

After Enemy at the Gates introduces audiences to the horrific street-to-street, house-to-house, factory-to-factory warfare with the massed armies pitted against each other, and showing German victories, demonstrating the awesome road to victory ahead, faced by the Red army, a subplot of the Stalingrad fight, becomes the plot of this story, killing key Nazi officers with snipers, in a guerrilla tactic maneuver.
The sniper confrontations revolve around the two principals, Vasilli (Jude Kaw) and German Major Konig (Ed Harris). Konig is brought on midstream to provide specialized help, after the sniper successes on the part of the Russians present, the Wehrmacht with problems, it is not trained to encounter. The psychological drama that develops, with no shortage of plausible acting, is among the most captivating and memorable aspects, in this field of film.

''Look at him with pride, because he's looking at you. The whole country is looking at you.''

The Germans' performance in the two World Wars is actually quite watchable, even though they were the losing side, considering their questionable allies and the size and strength of their opponents, Allied Forces. Nevertheless, the analysis is that they plan out every detail with a super organized approach, but make big errors, major errors of judgment, very basic is evaluating their opponents and taking on more than they can deal with. It is unlikely (actually, more like impossible) the Germans would have won WWI even had they occupied Stalingrad (they blew it the year before, by invading Russia too late), although it would have created more difficulties for the Russians (and the U.S. and U.K., heavily supplying them, heavily bombing the Germans, and fighting the Germans in North Africa).

But in any event, the character of Major Konig is not in the usual vein of the over organized, rigid-thinking German. He is steely, in the usual German way, but projects a quiet, more genuine confidence, and is trickier still than his enemies. No particular Nazi party man, he is a professional soldier, not a bad guy (in the evenhanded approach, demanded of modern War story telling, toward at least the common soldier) when he is obliged to kill a civilian, it climaxes a vendetta against him, without sadism or graphic display. He projects a feeling of command and invincibility so compelling that the viewer actually feels he will win, although knowing otherwise. This is no spoiler, of course, yet we are left with the aura that Konig was the better man. It would be a spoiler to say how it was done, and that is another positive for Director Jean-Jacques Annaud. Heroism reigns triumphant for both sides, which is another shining bonus for Enemy at the Gates.

Overall, it's a war film, not to be enjoyed for it's historical accuracy but for it's entertainment value and bemusing performances. We see Rachel Weisz, Bob Hoskins, even Joseph Fiennes whom seems underused, speaking these wonderful English accents, but when we see them they don't really seem Russian. This a Hollywood-ised version of History, which comes of more Patriot than Saving Private Ryan. I'm not saying it's not possible to make a film with English, looks at Boy in the striped Pyjamas and Schindler's List, but Enemy at the Gates makes them look somewhat silly.
Bonuses include battles, costumes, sniping, intellectual mind games and music that resembles Willow especially the German Snipers tune. Enemy at the Gates is a nice try at symbolizing and telling the story of Vassili Zaitsev, the struggle between two classes, socialism and capitalist fascism.

''He doesn't know you exist, but at that moment you're closer to him than anyone else on earth. You see his face through the sign. You see whether he shaved or not. You can see whether he's married if he's got a wedding ring. It's not like firing at a distant shape. It's not just a uniform. It's a man's face. Those faces don't go away. They come back and they get replaced by more faces.''

6/10