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Enemy at the Gates is set during the 1942-43 battle of Stalingrad, a key military
campaign in which Nazi forces met great resistance from the Russians. In the
midst of one particularly massive fight, political officer Danilov (Joseph
Fiennes) witnesses a young country man by the name of Vassili (Jude Law)
wiping out a group of German officers with a rifle from a decent distance.
Danilov realizes that this sharpshooter could, with the proper amount of
propaganda, become a national hero and a source of inspiration for a country
desperately in need of it.
With the approval of the city's chief defender, Nikita Kruschev (Bob
Hoskins), story after story is cranked out in the media telling the country
of how Vassili seems to be single-handedly wiping out the Nazis in
Stalingrad. Of course, he really is not, but that doesn't stop the Germans
from calling in their version of Vassili, Major Konig (Ed Harris) to put an
end to Vassili. There is also a romantic subplot going on as well, as
Danilov and Vassili fall in love with Tania (Rachel Weisz), a Russian Jew
who has lost both her parents at the hands of the Nazis, but not her
determination to fight alongside her fellow countrymen. Who will Tania
choose? Who will win the eventual showdown between Vassili and Konig?
While there is a sense of epic and scope
here, thanks mostly to Wolf Kroeger's production design, there is no sense
of any sort of compelling storytelling. Instead, movie clichés are piled on
higher than the rubble from a destroyed building. Director Jean-Jacques
Annaud, whose last film was the equally melodramatic and dull (Seven
Years In Tibet), delivers these clichés with all the subtlety of a Sherman Tank. Take every worn and
tired cliché from Hollywood Westerns and a thousand other war films, mix
them together with dull battle scenes, standoffs and showdowns devoid of any
tension and a love triangle that has as much passion as a cinder block - judging by the looks Danilov and Vassili were exchanging throughout, neither seemed interested in Tania - and you have a loud,
muddled mess that richly deserved the critical drubbing it got when it
premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year.
As for the cast, it really is sad to see a talented group of people like
these get stuck in such a steaming pile of dung like this. Jude Law is a
very talented actor with a bright future ahead of him, but this is not a movie for him to look back on with fond memories. He
looks lost throughout the entire film. Joseph Fiennes looks like he's in
some sort of pain. Weisz looks great (it's nice to know that in the middle
of a city that has been levelled by war, you can still get make-up at a
moment's notice), but brings nothing to her character that we haven't seen
somewhere else before; while Hoskins chews up the screen and growls a lot as
Kruschev, leaving Ed Harris to look like a zombie. Perhaps Harris was concentrating on
finishing Pollock, his vastly superior directing debut. The fact that none
of them even attempt an accent other than English or American only makes matters worse. At one point, the film was a convincing London.
Production design aside, the film is a mediocre success at best, the worst
aspect being James Horner's music score. This time around, he rips off his 1982 score for Star Trek II
and mixes it with the beginning of John Williams' theme for Schindler's
List.
An overblown epic that has as much impact on the viewer as a half-filled
water balloon, Jean-Jacques Annaud's Enemy At The Gates is a long, boring
version of a story that easily could have been an exciting cinematic one. A
cluttered mess from start to finish, this is a movie that wants to be a
cinematic experience along the lines of Saving Private Ryan. Instead, it
turns out to be even less involving as an episode of Hogan's Heroes.
If the topic of this film held promise for you, then I have two suggestions:
try to track down Joseph Vilsmaier's 1993 war film Stalingrad or better yet,
read the book by William Craig that this film was based on.
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