Enemy At The Gates DVD > Reviews > Bombs, bums and booby traps

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Indifferent to it
Story	Satisfactory
Characters / Performances	Good
Special Effects	Good
How does it compare to similar films?	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Watchable enough and good leads
Disadvantages:	Half baked philosophies and action sequences

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

As pseudo-intellectuals go I guess this is passable. In case you don’t know this is about two snipers, one Russian and one German, during the battle of Stalingrad who go around trying to pop a cap into each others heads, seems interesting enough. Yet this film is unfulfilling on so many levels.

Firstly there are many thought processes which are either shoe horned into the narrative, the peasant Russian soldier rivalling some rich German marksman, or are there simply by default, like the idea of two evil empires (in Western perception) fighting each other to decide the fate of the whole world (yes that does includes America). Also there is a bizarre, and I must repeat this, bizarre love triangle. There, I guess, to show the human side of the conflict, but when Wiesz is on screen she tends more to stifle the visual and atmospheric war sequences, and elongate those quite scenes where people talk about their lives, for us to find the pathos. There is also a terrible contrived feel to all they say, to paraphrase, ‘Each day they come home they celebrate as this is borrowed time and blah blah blah.’ Yes, that’s very true, but the writing is lazy by mentioning such uninspired dross.

Don’t get me wrong, Wiesz handles her role well enough, as does all the other cast members (Fiennes and Law) and only the caricatured Khrushchev, played by Bob Hoskins, seems a little too much. Ed Harris gives a remarkably subtle performance of a callous killer with an indistinct, yet present, emotional past.

In between all the soul searching, and there’s a lot, are the set pieces that keep the film together. They are well thought out and captivate you to a point but they feel overly episodic. To explain, they have a good pretext and the situations are quite exciting. Examples are: Fiennes and Law stuck behind the German army; Law pinned down behind an oven; A department store trap; and their sniper duties as they dart between the destroyed buildings. But each set piece ends abruptly with no closure to the dual. I understand these are snipers, not would be Rambos, but still this is cinema and more plausible and more exciting endings could have been thought up.

So, to sum up, it’s sort of okay. Don’t get bogged down in the ideas that are never realised, nor expect a modern day take on war which captures both the scale of death yet still entices you to root for some soldiers to kill another bunch of soldiers. Just watch it for the wonderfully bleak war scenes, the odd bit of gritty drama, and for Rachel Weisz’s bum.