Directed by: Jean Jacques-Annuad
Grade: C
Jean Jacques-Annuad's Enemy at the Gates is only one of many war films to be released after Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan strongly revived interest in World War II. As of now, while typing out this review, I have yet to see Saving Private Ryan from start to finish, but it is on my Movie Marathon List, and I plan to watch it as soon as I can. Anyway, Enemy at the Gates follows the exploits of famed Soviet sniper Vassili Zaitsev, and the efforts of top German sniper Major Koning to track him down and silence him, all during the 1942-43 Battle of Stalingrad, the bloodiest battle in history in which about 2,000,000 soldiers and civilians died. The title for the film is borrowed from the 1973 book by William Craig, and which I have now read twice. Enemy at the Gates promises to be a decisive war film but is all too far from achieving that goal. I never really felt as connected with the true story as much as I should have, which may be due to the moderate acting and the clichéd script. The opening battle scene though, where the Russians cross the Volga and futility storm German defensive positions, is the only sequence in the entire movie that truly depicts the horrors of war up close. As I was watching this sequence, I realized that none of these men stood a chance against what was facing them, and yet they still obeyed orders and charged into a hail of machine gun bullets, rifle volleys and mortar fire. The rest of the film, sadly, diminishes as it becomes rapidly repetitive in nature and adds practically nothing new to the war genre, as I was unfortunately able to predict what was about to happen in nearly every scene. This is a unique war film but not a good one, and don’t ask me why the Russians speak with English accents! C
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