The Bulletin
31 July, 2001
By Susie Eisenhuth
Compared with recent Hollywood efforts, this WWII film is a masterful success thanks no end to its high-calibre cast.
It's all Steven Spielberg's fault. It was Saving Private Ryan that put war movies back on the Hollywood agenda. And it wasn't just the big box office result. It was more that with WWIi Spielberg had tapped into a peculiar kind of nostalgia for the gold old days. when life - and war - was simpler. The bad guy threatened to take over the world. The good guys had to stop them. None of your murky moral dilemmas. Vietnam was bad enough, but wars got even messier after that. In fact from the US point of view, it's been hard to rustle up a good enemy since the great amorphous Red Peril turned out to be a confusion of embattled tribes as apt to make war on each other as anyone else. And even if you did manage to get a good stoush going, what with the pesky media beaming it all up as it happened, it's just been that much harder than it used to be to convince people that war is an ennobling affair.
The other really agreeable thing about WWII - as Hollywood's latest WWII juggernaut, Pearl Harbor, has recently reminded us - was that the good guys won. Pearl Harbour also demonstrated the benefits of a revitalised WWII in terms of providing large -scale spectacles to fuel the burgeoning special effects industry.
Hot on the heels of Pearl Harbor comes EATG in which director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who likes a bit of spectacle (Quest for Fire, 7 Yrs In Tibet & Wings of Courage, the first fiction film made for IMAX in 3-D) takes on the 1942 battle for Stalingrad.
During the making of Pearl Harbor, war veterans voiced unease about the film-makers using the devasting attack as a backdrop for a fictional love story. And there will be those who feel equally uncomfortable about the appropriation of the dreadful events of Stalingrad - in which some 800,000 Germans and more than a million Russians died.
The film is based (loosely) on the exploits of one Vassili Vaitsev, whose real life exploits a s a sniper are featured in the Russian memorial to the heroes of Stalingrad. The film-makers acknowledge that various accounts of Vaitsev exist, and were in use as propaganda at the time. But the film, not surprisingly, opts for a clear cut hero, casting the personable Jude Law as the peasant boy turned sharpshooter who still chants the mantra taught by his grandfather ("I am a stone") as he blends himself into the battlescape and awaits his prey. The story sees him befriended by an officer (Joseph Fiennes) but, as we know from Pearl Harbor, loyalty and friendship are up for grabs when 2 friends fall for the one woman(Rachel Weisz).
With Pearl Harbor so recently upon us, EATG looks masterful by comparison, although there are cringes aplenty as the writers struggle for dialogue as momentous as the events. Still, the high-calibre cast works wonders. The charismatic Jude Law - playing clear eyed and calm against Fiennes' twitchy intellectual - is a hero to die for, and Ed Harris, as the German sent to hunt him down, is a suitably steely foe as the pair inch their way to High Noon amid the Stalingrad rubble.
In a separate square - highlighted is the phrase "Jude Law is a hero to die for and Ed Harris is a steely foe"
