The Star
March 15, 2001
By John Highfield

Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan may have captured the full physical horror of war but Jean-Jacques Annaud goes one important stage further with the monumental Enemy at the Gates.

For he manages to find the spark of humanity which Spielberg's noisy epic lacked, transforming a war story into a moving drama of real lives.

And you get that sense of human loss and frailty as soon as you see Jude Law's look of almost child-like horror at the violence surrounding him as he witnesses the carnage which awaits him and other young men thrust into the front line to help Soviet Russia defeat itself against the invading Nazis.

Based on a true story, Law is Vassili, the young marksman whose prowesss with a rifle makes him the Red Army's top sniper as the Germans advance on Stalingrad, a key position in the war in Russia.

He becomes a national hero when journalist Danilov - Joseph Fiennes - spots the morale-boosting potential of the story and elevates him to almost mythical proportions in a bid to encourage the people of Stalingrad to stand firm.

But Vassili's success also attracts the interest of the Germans, who despatch their own top marksman Major Konig - a cool Ed Harris - to kill him, setting in motion the game of cat and mouse which provides the story with much of its tension.

At the same time, though, this is a sweeping epic in the grand tradition of Gone With the Wind or Doctor Zhivago, a love story in which Rachel Weisz's heroine is adored by both Law and Fiennes, tearing apart a friendship and leading to tragedy.

As we saw in both Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love, of course, the camera simply loves Fiennes, finding something interesting in his face at every angle.

Even amid the mud and rubble of a destroyed city, he and his two co-stars display the sort of quality that makes for great entertainment.

The plot sometimes doesn't bear close scrutiny, some of the dialogue is a little obvious and motivations are too often buried under the spectacle.

But somehow - mainly thanks to that central emotional triangle - the drama never fails to engange, an epic romance in the oldest, truest sense.