reviews/enemy-at-the-gates-20010315

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15019

Enemy at the Gates. Paramount Pictures.

Reviewed by David R. Stone

Published on H-War (June, 2002)

"Therein lies the problem. While a compelling writer with an eye for detail, Craig is not particularly skeptical of his sources. In his account of the sniper duel, Craig takes Stalinist propaganda at face value. "

There is nothing wrong with setting a fictional story against an historical backdrop; to claim it as true is another matter. In this case, the sniper duel only adds to the plot's contrived elements: Zaitsev and Chernova's chance encounter on a train to Stalingrad, or Chernova's decision to become a sniper instead of a radio operator. She returns to the front lines after she personally happens to intercept a German transmission providing excruciating detail on the death of her parents as part of a mass execution of a trainload of deported Jews.

One irritating aspect of the film, as the above incident displays, is its reliance on cliche. Cliches do have the virtue of not being strictly inaccurate--after all, cliches require an element of truth to become cliches. Still, they suggest a certain laziness of presentation. This would include the balalaikas that the Soviet soldiers faithfully break out at quiet moments, and Khrushchev's behest to a failed officer to kill himself to avert execution. It extends to the opening sequence of Zaitsev's introduction to Stalingrad, where panicking soldiers are immediately shot, troops are ordered into obviously suicidal attacks and machine-gunned when they fall back, and due to lack of rifles half the troops are ordered to seize up weapons from their fallen comrades (much more typical of the Russian experience in World War I, not World War II). While these certainly happened on the Eastern Front, their juxtaposition seems forced and unoriginal. While cliches may irritate, they are not the same as actual errors in presentation, which Enemy at the Gates suffers from in significant numbers. 

More serious are the errors that would lead to serious misunderstandings of the battle and its context. They are many. Most significant is the picture the film gives of what truly mattered at Stalingrad, and what the battle was like. First, it presents a picture of Stalingrad as a sniper's battle. While snipers were certainly significant, this ignores the more important lessons of Stalingrad: the terrible overextension of German manpower and material resources required by Hitler's drive on the Caucasus oil fields, the astonishing endurance of individual Soviet soldiers, and the steadily increasing abilities of the Soviet high command, which was able to plan and organize an astoundingly successful counteroffensive to trap Paulus's Sixth Army in the city. 
The fact that hundreds of thousands of German and Soviet soldiers were dying in the crowded ruins of Stalingrad, with the front lines often separated by a hallway or alley, is a fact that makes only intermittent appearances--it would detract from the utterly personal and contextless nature of the sniper duel. 
There are other historical problems as well. Ron Perlman's exceedingly grizzled veteran sniper Kulikov tells a chronologically muddled story of his training at a German sniper school (presumably as part of the pre-1933 collaboration) while Hitler and Stalin strolled arm in arm (not literally, we presume, but figuratively only after 1939). Upon the outbreak of war (in 1941), he was then arrested and beaten to force him to confess he was a German spy (typical of 1937). Thanks to this, he has a mouthful of steel teeth. This last at least is based on some reality: future Marshal Konstantin Rokossovskii lost numerous teeth before getting out of the NKVD's clutches. The Soviet high command is seriously distorted.While Chuikov or Vasilevskii never make an appearance, this is excusable: no film can possibly show every aspect of a battle, or all the personalities involved. What is inexcusable is the impression created that the Stalingrad campaign was run by Nikita Khrushchev. Bob Hoskins does quite well at portraying Khrushchev in all his warty peasant earthiness, but Khrushchev was simply not the essential figure that the film portrays him as being. Finally, at the film's climax, Danilov sacrifices himself in despair over his loss of faith in Marxism-Leninism. This is not because he has decided that human interests outweigh class interests, or that the theory of surplus value is nonsense, but because sexual jealousy will make an egalitarian society impossible.
__This does not, I find, ring especially true when coming from a zealous young Stalinist. To end on a brighter note, Enemy at the Gates has at the very least boosted the number of my students who drop by the office to ask questions about Stalingrad. I only wish it had done a better job of giving them good answers._

_______________________________________________________________________________

First things first. The film Enemy at the Gates is a good thing for the study of the Eastern Front during World War II. If even one in one hundred of those who see the film is inspired to pick up William Craig's book Enemy at the Gates or any other book on the war in the east, then director and co-writer Jean-Jacques Annaud has done a great service to those who research and teach Soviet history. If it helps even a little to bring the scale and importance of the Soviet-German clash home to Western audiences, the film will right a great historical wrong: the terrible ignorance within the Western public of how central the Eastern Front was to the outcome of World War II. That said, I found Enemy at the Gates terribly disappointing. As both entertainment and a historical portrayal of the Battle of Stalingrad, the film fell far short of its potential. After beginning with a visually spectacular sequence depicting young Soviet soldier Vassili [sic] Zaitsev's arrival in Stalingrad, the remainder of the film never lives up to the level promised by its opening. This especially hurts because the elements to make a profoundly interesting film were certainly present. The battle of Stalingrad offers all the human drama and pathos one could ask. The filmmakers spared no expense in sets and effects to recreate the look of a devastated Stalingrad, down to Russian-language obscenities scrawled on the walls.

 The cast is top-notch: Jude Law is remarkably good as Zaitsev; Rachel Weisz and Joseph Fiennes do the best they can with underwritten parts as sniper Tania Chernova and political officer Danilov. Bob Hoskins is superb as a profane and warty Nikita Khrushchev; likewise Ed Harris as the German master sniper Konig. Despite all this, the film wastes these resources in an attempt to recreate the strategy that James Cameron employed in Titanic: given an historical moment of great emotional resonance, focus instead on a love triangle worthy of teenagers and presumably aimed at appealing to teenagers. 

 The plot follows Zaitsev as he arrives in Stalingrad as a naive and innocent soldier, only to be immediately plunged into the horrors of battle. In a fortuitous encounter, Zaitsev demonstrates his exceptional marksmanship by picking off five Germans in front of Danilov. Danilov then turns Zaitsev into a sniper-hero to inspire the Soviet soldiers at Stalingrad. They both encounter Tania Chernova, a beautiful young intellectual turned soldier, and compete for her love with heroism and gifts of sturgeon. As Zaitsev's renown and kills grow, the German army calls in Konig, their top sniper, to hunt him down. Strictly as entertainment, I found the film remarkably slow-moving. Others may appreciate the deliberate pace. More serious, from my point of view, were the historical inaccuracies and oversights that mar the film. William Craig's Enemy at the Gates (New York, 1973) provides the basic elements of the plot, and the main characters appear in it: Zaitsev, Chernova, Danilov, even the young boy spy Sacha Fillipov [sic]. Therein lies the problem. While a compelling writer with an eye for detail, Craig is not particularly skeptical of his sources. In his account of the sniper duel, Craig takes Stalinist propaganda at face value. There is no source outside of Soviet propaganda for even the existence of the German supersniper (Konings in Craig's book; Thorwald in others). Craig took the propaganda built up around Zaitsev's 242 kills as a sniper and presented it as truth, from where it made its way onto the screen as an ostensibly true story. There is nothing wrong with setting a fictional story against an historical backdrop; to claim it as true is another matter. In this case, the sniper duel only adds to the plot's contrived elements: Zaitsev and Chernova's chance encounter on a train to Stalingrad, or Chernova's decision to become a sniper instead of a radio operator. She returns to the front lines after she personally happens to intercept a German transmission providing excruciating detail on the death of her parents as part of a mass execution of a trainload of deported Jews. One irritating aspect of the film, as the above incident displays, is its reliance on cliche. Cliches do have the virtue of not being strictly inaccurate--after all, cliches require an element of truth to become cliches. Still, they suggest a certain laziness of presentation.This would include the balalaikas that the Soviet soldiers faithfully break out at quiet moments, and Khrushchev's behest to a failed officer to kill himself to avert execution. It extends to the opening sequence of Zaitsev's introduction to Stalingrad, where panicking soldiers are immediately shot, troops are ordered into obviously suicidal attacks and machine-gunned when they fall back, and due to lack of rifles half the troops are ordered to seize up weapons from their fallen comrades (much more typical of the Russian experience in World War I, not World War II). While these certainly happened on the Eastern Front, their juxtaposition seems forced and unoriginal. While cliches may irritate, they are not the same as actual errors in presentation, which Enemy at the Gates suffers from in significant numbers. Quite often, errors in small particulars that grate on those in the know are utterly irrelevant to what the general public will take away from the film. While these mistakes call into question the filmmakers' credibility, historians must accept that no one will come away with a faulty understanding of Stalingrad because Nikita Khrushchev's name is misspelled in the end credits. There are other problems of this type: the commissar Danilov tells Zaitsev that the Soviet people are reading about him "in the Crimea"; the Germans had completely occupied the Crimea by July 1942, well before the events of the film. Zaitsev also hears of Danilov's promotion to the General Staff--an odd career move for a junior political officer still at the front. Graduate students more knowledgeable than I in these fields tell me that German aircraft bear Western Front markings, not Eastern Front, and that Zaitsev's particular telescopic scope is anachronistic. There are certainly more. Again, those errors are irritating to those who catch them, but minor to any broad audience. More serious are the errors that would lead to serious misunderstandings of the battle and its context. 

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/enemy-at-the-gates-20010315

Many German critics shat all over this $80 million epic when it opened at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. The chief complaint about this lavish depiction of the German invasion of Russia during the pivotal World War II battle of Stalingrad (1942 to 1943) is that the movie had gone Hollywood. Financed with German money, Enemy nonetheless stars American Ed Harris as Major Konig, the Nazi sharpshooter, and British Jude Law as Vassili Zaitsev, the real-life Russian sniper who tries to bring Konig down. Worse, the core of the movie involves Vassili's romantic rivalry with his political-officer friend Danilov (British Joseph Fiennes) over the affections of Tania (Rachel Weisz, another Brit), the Jewish soldier who truly loves Vassili. Accounts vary over who really loved whom, and William Craig's nonfiction book Enemy at the Gates only inspired the script by Alain Godard and director Jean-Jacques Annaud, both French. It's not a strict adaptation, so things get made up.
Still, despite the flak about romantic cliches and miscast actors, Annaud's film boasts harrowing battle scenes as Russian relief troops are bombarded while crossing the River Volga, and Stalingrad itself is battered by air and sea while tanks and soldiers overrun its streets. In the shell of the city, Vassili and Konig face off in a duel of wits that is meant to mirror the larger battle. Any flaws in execution pale against those moments when the film brings history to vital life.

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Main cast[edit]

• Jude Law – Vasily Zaytsev
• Joseph Fiennes – Commisar Danilov
• Rachel Weisz – Tania Chernova
• Bob Hoskins – Nikita Khrushchev
• Ed Harris – Major Erwin König
• Ron Perlman – Kulikov
• Eva Mattes – Mother Filippova
• Gabriel Thomson – Sasha Filippov
• Matthias Habich – General Friedrich Paulus
• Sophie Rois – Ludmilla
• Ivan Shvedoff – Volodya
• Mario Bandi – Anton
• Gennadi Vengerov – Starshina
• Mikhail Matveyev – Grandfather

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/enemy-at-the-gates-2001

"Enemy at the Gates" opens with a battle sequence that deserves comparison with "Saving Private Ryan," and then narrows its focus until it is about two men playing a cat-and-mouse game in the ruins of Stalingrad. The Nazi is sure he is the cat. The Russian fears he may be the mouse.

The movie is inspired by true events, we're told, although I doubt real life involved a love triangle; the film might have been better and leaner if it had told the story of the two soldiers and left out the soppy stuff. Even so, it's remarkable, a war story told as a chess game where the loser not only dies, but goes by necessity to an unmarked grave.

This is a rare World War II movie that does not involve Americans. It takes place in the autumn of 1942, in Stalingrad, during Hitler's insane attack on the Soviet Union. At first it appeared the Germans would roll over the ragged Russian resistance, but eventually the stubbornness of the Soviets combined with the brutal weather and problems with supply lines to deliver Hitler a crushing defeat and, many believe, turn the tide of the war.

We see the early hopelessness of the Soviet cause in shots showing terrified Russian soldiers trying to cross a river and make a landing in the face of withering fire. They are ordered to charge the Germans across an exposed no-man's land, and when half are killed and the others turned back, they are fired on as cowards by their own officers. This is a sustained sequence as harrowing, in its way, as Steven Spielberg's work.

One of the Russians stands out. His name is Vassili (Jude Law), and we know from the title sequence that he is a shepherd from the Urals, whose marksmanship was learned by killing wolves that preyed on his flock. In the heat of battle, he kills five Germans, and is noticed by Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), the political officer assigned to his unit. As Russian morale sinks lower, Danilov prints a leaflet praising the heroic shepherd boy.

We learn that Vassili is indeed a good shot, but has little confidence in his own abilities (in the opening sequence, he has one bullet to use against a wolf, and misses). Danilov encourages him, and as the battle lines solidify and both sides dig into their positions, Vassili continues to pick off Germans and star in Danilov's propaganda. Even Nikita Khrushchev (Bob Hoskins, looking uncannily like the real thing), the leader of the Soviet defense of Stalingrad, praises the boy, and the publicity strategy.

As German resolve falters, they bring in their own best sniper, a sharpshooter named Konig (Ed Harris), a Bavarian aristocrat who in peacetime shoots deer. He is older, hawk-faced, clear-eyed, a professional. His assignment is to kill Vassili and end the propaganda. "How will you find him?" he's asked. "I'll have him find me." The heart of the movie is the duel between the two men, played out in a blasted cityscape of bombed factories and rubble. The war recedes into the background as the two men, who have never had a clear glimpse of each other, tacitly agree on their ground of battle. The director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, makes the geography clear--the open spaces, the shadows, the hollow pipes that are a way to creep from one point to another.

The duel is made more complicated when Vassili meets Sacha (Gabriel Marshall-Thomson), a boy of 7 or 8 who moves like a wraith between the opposing lines and is known to both snipers. Through Sacha, Vassili meets his neighbor Tanya (Rachel Weisz), a Jewish woman whose parents were killed by the Nazis. Vassili falls in love with Tanya--and so does Danilov, and this triangle seems like a plot device to separate the scenes that really interest us.

Sacha serves as a useful character, however. As a child of war, he is old beyond his years, but not old enough to know how truly ruthless and deadly a game he is involved in. His final appearance in the film brings a gasp from the audience, but fits into the implacable logic of the situation.

Annaud ("Quest for Fire," "In the Name of the Rose," "Seven Years in Tibet") makes big-scale films where men test themselves against their ideas. Here he shows the Nazi sniper as a cool professional, almost without emotion, taking a cerebral approach to the challenge. The Russian is quite different; his confidence falters when he learns who he's up against, and he says, simply, "He's better than me." The strategy of the final confrontation between the two men has a kind of poetry to it, and I like the physical choices that Harris makes in the closing scene.

Is the film also about a duel between two opposing ideologies, Marxism and Nazism? Danilov, the propagandist, paints it that way, but actually it is about two men placed in a situation where they have to try to use their intelligence and skills to kill each other. When Annaud focuses on that, the movie works with rare concentration. The additional plot stuff and the romance are kind of a shame.

Reception[edit]

Based on 137 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, the film received a 54% approval rating from critics, with an average score of 5.7/10; the reviews were summarized as "Atmospheric and thrilling, Enemy at the Gates gets the look and feel of war right. However, the love story seems out of place."^[5] Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating in the 0–100 range based on reviews from top mainstream critics, calculated an average score of 53, based on 33 reviews.^[6]

Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four and wrote that it "is about two men placed in a situation where they have to try to use their intelligence and skills to kill each other. When Annaud focuses on that, the movie works with rare concentration. The additional plot stuff and the romance are kind of a shame".^[7] New York Magazine's Peter Ranier was less kind, declaring "It's as if an obsessed film nut had decided to collect every bad war-film convention on one computer and program it to spit out a script."^[8]Peter Travers of Rolling Stone admitted the film had faults, but that "any flaws in execution pale against those moments when the film brings history to vital life."^[9]

The film was poorly received in the former Soviet Union.^[10] Some Red Army Stalingrad veterans were so offended by inaccuracies in the film and how the Red Army was portrayed that on 7 May 2001, shortly after the film premiered in Russia, they expressed their displeasure in the Duma, demanding a ban of the film, but their request was not granted.^[11][12]

The film was received poorly in Germany. Critics claimed that it simplified history and glorified war.^[13][14][15] At the Berlinale film festival, it was booed. Annaud stated afterwards that he would not present another film at Berlinale, calling it a "slaughterhouse" and claiming that his film received much better reception elsewhere.^[16][17]

Historical accuracy[edit]

Zaytsev was a senior sergeant of the 2nd Battalion, 1047th Rifle Regiment, 284th Tomsk Rifle Division. He was interviewed by Vasily Grossman during the battle, and the account of that interview, lightly fictionalized in his novel, Life and Fate (Part One, Chapter 55), is substantially the same as that shown in the movie, without putting a name to the German sniper with whom he dueled.

Historian Antony Beevor suggests in his book Stalingrad that, while Zaytsev was a real person, the story of his duel (dramatised in the film) with König is fictional. Although William Craig's book Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad includes a "sniper's duel" between Zaytsev and König, the sequence of events in the film is fictional. Zaytsev, in an interview claimed to have engaged in a sniper duel over a number of days. Zaytsev, the only historical source for the story, stated that after killing the German sniper, and on collecting his tags, he found that he had killed the head of the Berlin Sniper School.^[4] No sniper named König has ever been identified in the German records.

In the film, Jude Law uses a 7.62x54r Mosin Model 1891/30 sniper rifle with a PU 3.5 power sniper scope (i.e. the image is magnified 3 and a half times). Vasily Zaytsev used a Model 1891/30 sniper rifle with an earlier and larger sniper telescope (his rifle is preserved in a museum in Russia). Also, the poster for the film reverses the Mosin 91/30 rifle photograph so that the bolt handle appears on the left side of the rifle, instead of the right side where it should be.

The love story between Vasily and Tania has no basis in Zaytsev's memoirs.