The Daily Telegraph (Sydney)
26 July 2001
By Vicky Roach

* * * 1/2
In terms of opening battle sequences, Enemy At The Gates follows on where Saving Private Ryan and Gladiator left off. Wave upon wave of Russian soldiers, half of them unarmed, are slaughtered in a futile assault on the German army during the siege of Stalingrad. "The one with the rifle shoots. When the one with the rifle is killed, the one following him picks up the rifle and shoots," shouts a Russian officer as he hands out limited guns and ammunition to newly-arrived soldiers. When the survivors attempt a retreat in the face of such overwhelming odds they are gunned down by their own officers.

French director Jean-Jacques Annaud's depiction of the battle for Stalingrad, one of the defining chapters of World War II, goes several notches past disturbing, before (wisely) narrowing its focus to just two of the survivors.

Set against a backdrop of bodies, the film is the story of real-life Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law), a shepherd from the Urals, and Commissar Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), the political officer-publicist who turns him into a national hero. Danilov's propaganda campaign is so successful the Germans send in their best sharpshooter to eliminate the man who has given new heart to the Russian people.

And so, Sergeant Zaitsev and Major Erwin Konig (Ed Harris), an ice-cold German aristocrat, stalk each other in cruel isolation while Stalingrad falls around them. Adding a human dimension to the story are Sacha, the 14-year-old boy (Gabriel Marshall-Thomson) who risks his life for his hero, Vassili; and Tania, the militia fighter with whom both Zaitsev and Danilov fall in love with.

When it comes to tortured love triangles played out against a backdrop of war, Enemy At the Gates is a good deal less schmaltzy than its two main rivals (Pearl Harbor and Captain Corelli's Mandolin). As a straightforward war story, it's brutally compelling.