Enemy at the Gates conveys the idea that a powerful media during a war is an ideal weapon to inspire the soldiers, to make heroes and to awaken the nation. Studs Terkel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, ’’The Good War’’: An Oral History of World War II, provides two accounts of the Soviet media during the campaign for Russia that began in 1941. One concerns the radio station at Leningrad after months of brutal warfare have left the city virtually destroyed.
The conditions at Leningrad -- 20 degrees below zero, no transportation, very little food, and corpses stacked nearly as high as the city’s ruined buildings. Another account belongs to a Russian poet, Olag Tsakumov, who was seven when the war began. He recalls reading a poem called ’’To The Victory Day’’ over the airwaves in 1941, and says of this desperate time, ’’It was important for the soldiers at the front to hear this childish voice on the radio, to know that the children of Leningrad were alive.’’ The story of Russian children inspiring their countrymen to fight. Enemy at the Gates, presents a fair view of the war on the Eastern front, focuses on the Russian media’s role in motivating the army to its eventual victory over Nazi imperialism. It is a melodrama about perseverance, courage, and love, and about young men and women discovering their best selves during war.
It begins with an expository voice-over and animated map, in which a black pool spills out of a swastika in the heart of Germany, overflows the nation’s borders, and spreads like oil over continental Europe. Enemy at the Gates takes as its source a historical footnote to the battle for Stalingrad -- the rise in the Russian army of a preternaturally gifted sniper, Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law), whose skill at picking off German officers is so prodigious that it elevates him to the status of a hero. Concerned with the jumpstart Vassili is giving to Russian morale, the Nazis send their own master sniper, Major Koenig (Ed Harris), to hunt him down. Vassili’s skills as a marksman are demonstrated when he first appears on screen as a child camouflaged in a snow bank, drawing a bead on a wolf who is stalking the family horse. His tiny finger hovers steadily over his rifle trigger. ’’I am a stone, ’’ he says in voice-over, ’’I do not move.’’ Vassili’s talent with a gun is akin to a kind of transcendental meditation bound to prevail. A moment later the film opens in August 1942, and the first of many bloody battle scenes in the centre of Stalingrad.
The city has been reduced to rubble by the time Vassili arrives. Here Vassili meets Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), the Russian political officer who eventually orchestrate Vassili’s rise to fame. While posing as a dead Russian, Danilov spies a high-ranking German officer with an entourage and levels a rifle on him, but balks at the crucial moment. He asks Vassili if he knows how to shoot; Vassili takes the rifle and seems nearly as surprised as Danilov when he manages to assassinate all five Germans, timing his shots to coincide with explosions so none of the Germans finds out what’s happening before each receives the bullet meant for him. Danilov writes an article about Vassili’s exploits in an Army newspaper.
Stalingrad is about to be overrun, and a menacing Nikita Khrushchev (Bob Hoskins) is searching for a way to force his troops to stand up against the Nazi onslaught. His searches for a desperate solution for his troops to stand up to Germans on Danilov’s suggestion Vassili is promoted to the Russian sniper corps, where he proceeds to kill -- apparently -- scores of Germans with each passing day. This is conveyed through a montage of newspaper articles featuring a stoic Vassili posing with his rifle, and an ever-growing array of dead Germans’ helmets. This is Enemy at the Gates’s most elegant theme, that to be observed is to die, but to be invisible and quiet as the dead may allow you to survive. This is more fully elaborated with the arrival of Major Koenig, a German officer who is out there to assassinate Vasilli. During all this, Stalingrad lies devastated in debris debris.
As a rendering of the battle for Stalingrad it is far too idealistic to possibly be accurate account of the war. But as an occasionally sombre meditation on the toll war takes on the human soul, it is not without its moments. The film contains an intriguing and potential-filled premise of two master snipers hunting for and trying to avoid each other in the middle of war-ravaged Stalingrad One such character is the cool and calculating seasoned master while the other is the more impulsive and green, but still highly proficient counterpart.
A wonderful movie.