Enemy At The Gates movie review (2001)
"Enemy at the Gates" opens up with a fight series that deserves contrast with "Conserving Private Ryan," and after that narrows its focus until it has to do with 2 guys having fun a cat-and-mouse video game in the damages of Stalingrad. The Nazi makes sure he is the feline. The Russian worries he may be the computer mouse.
The movie is inspired by real occasions, we're informed, although I doubt reality involved a love triangle; the movie might have been better and leaner if it had informed the tale of the 2 soldiers and excluded the soppy stuff. However, it is amazing, a battle tale informed as a chess video game where the loser not just passes away, but passes requirement to an unmarked grave.
This is an unusual Globe Battle II movie that doesn't involve Americans. It occurs in the fall of 1942, in Stalingrad, throughout Hitler's crazy attack on the Soviet Union. At first it appeared the Germans would certainly roll over the rough Russian resistance, but eventually the stubbornness of the Soviets combined with the ruthless weather and problems with provide lines to deliver Hitler a squashing loss and, many think, transform the trend of the battle.
We see the very early hopelessness of the Soviet cause in shots showing terrified Russian soldiers attempting to go across a river and make a touchdown in the face of withering terminate. They are ordered to charge the Germans throughout an subjected no-man's land, when fifty percent are eliminated and the others transformed back, they are terminated on as cowards by their own policemans. This is a continual series as painful, in its way, as Steven Spielberg's work.
Among the Russians stands apart. His name is Vassili (Jude Law), and we understand from the title series that he is a shepherd from the Urals, whose marksmanship was learned by killing wolves that took advantage of his group. In the heat of fight, he eliminates 5 Germans, and is noticed by Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), the political policeman designated to his unit. As Russian morale sinks lower, Danilov prints a brochure applauding the heroic shepherd boy.
We learn that Vassili is certainly a great fired, but has little self-confidence in his own capcapacities (in the opening up series, he has one bullet to use versus a wolf, and misses out on). Danilov motivates him, and as the fight lines solidify and both sides go into their settings, Vassili proceeds to pick off Germans and celebrity in Danilov's propaganda. Also Nikita Khrushchev (Bob Hoskins, looking uncannily such as the real thing), the leader of the Soviet protection of Stalingrad, praises the boy, and the promotion strategy.
As German resolve falters, they generate their own best sniper, a sharpshooter called Konig (Ed Harris), a Bavarian aristocrat that in peacetime shoots deer. He is older, hawk-faced, clear-eyed, a professional. His project is to eliminate Vassili and finish the propaganda. "How will you find him?" he's asked. "I'll have him find me." The heart of the movie is the battle in between the 2 guys, played out in a blasted cityscape of flopped manufacturing facilities and rubble. The battle declines right into the history as the 2 guys, that have never ever had a clear peek of each various other, tacitly settle on their ground of fight. The supervisor, Jean-Jacques Annaud, makes the location clear--the open up spaces, the darkness, the hollow pipelines that are a way to sneak from one indicate another.
The battle is made more complicated when Vassili meets Sacha (Gabriel Marshall-Thomson), a young boy of 7 or 8 that moves such as a wraith in between the opposing lines and is known to both snipers. Through Sacha, Vassili meets his next-door neighbor Tanya (Rachel Weisz), a Jewish lady whose moms and dads were eliminated by the Nazis. Vassili drops crazy with Tanya--and so does Danilov, and this triangular looks like a plot device to divide the scenes that truly rate of passion us.
Sacha functions as a useful personality, however. As a child of battle, he is old past his years, but not old enough to know how really callous and fatal a video game he is associated with. His last look in the movie brings a gasp from the target market, but suits the implacable reasoning of the circumstance.
Annaud ("Quest for Terminate," "In the Name of the Increased," "7 Years in Tibet") makes big-scale movies where guys test themselves versus their ideas. Here he shows the Nazi sniper as an awesome professional, almost without feeling, taking a analytical approach to the challenge. The Russian is quite different; his self-confidence falters when he learns that he's against, and he says, simply, "He's better compared to me." The strategy of the last conflict in between the 2 guys has a type of verse to it, and I such as the physical choices that Harris makes in the shutting scene.
Is the movie also about a battle in between 2 opposing ideologies, Marxism and Nazism? Danilov, the propagandist, paints it this way, but actually it has to do with 2 guys put in a circumstance where they need to attempt to use their knowledge and abilities to eliminate each various other. When Annaud focuses on that particular, the movie works with unusual focus. The additional plot stuff and the love are type of a pity.