Poor man’s Apocalypse Now: The tone felt very similar in both of these films, but unfortunately Enemy At The Gates doesn’t have anything to say.
★★☆☆☆
Ok, I asked for this movie. I begged, nay pleaded for a movie that would go down smooth. A movie that didn’t ask any deep existential questions, a fun popcorn flick. Well, fuck me, I got it… On paper, Enemy At The Gates should be my favorite movie. 1) It’s a biopic 2) It’s billed as a suspenseful thriller 3) It’s a war movie 4) Ed Fucking Harris. However, it misses on a few points, which turn out to be key.
Enemy At The Gates is a war movie centered on the Battle of Stalingrad during WWII. The major figures are Jude Law playing the real-life sniper Vassili Zaitsev. Joseph Fiennes plays a officer working in propaganda who uses Vassili’s sniper success to bolster morale. Ed Harris plays a sniper on the German side of the war who is Vassili’s rival during a 3 day sniper duel. Other characters include Bob Hoskins as Khrushchev, Ron Perlman as a sniper trainer, and Rachel Weisz as a love interest that will remain as nameless as she is unimportant to the plot. (Side note: true to my biopic post, I googled the shit out of Vassili Zaitsev. He’s a badass.)
There are several reasons I’m not currently purchasing the special edition of this movie. There’s a love triangle shoehorned into the plot that does nothing except fill out screen time and ends exactly as you expect it to. If it does anything it simply distracts from the lack of suspense in the film. Which leads to my second and main problem with the film: suspense. Since this movie is about a sniper duel, it tries to rely on suspense instead of action. Unfortunately, the film breaks Spielberg’s rule of suspense that he wrote in Jaws: it’s not what you show, but how you show something that keeps the audience involved. Spielberg was able to keep an audience on the edge of their seats using a malfunctioning, rubbery shark and B-roll underwater footage. He was able to keep an audience’s disbelief suspended so well that we all believed you could blow up a shark with an oxygen tank.
After watching Enemy At The Gates, I watched The Patriot and First Blood for comparison. Unfortunately for Enemy At The Gates, the comparison made me drop my rating by a full star. There are two major ways to keep your audience involved in a war movie: 1) Include lots of explosions and firefights 2) Keep the audience guessing. Since the subject of this movie is snipers, you can’t rely on explosions. I believe the filmmakers should have kept the audience on its toes. In The Patriot, every character’s life is at risk since main characters continue to die. In First Blood, Rambo unleashes a guerilla warfare that no one (including the audience) expects. But in Enemy at the Gates, the plot goes according to plan, with very little unexpected. The characters are mildly interesting, but there isn’t a lot of development. There isn’t a strong takeaway either. Unless you count the message that Soviet Russia blows and blows twice as hard when there’s a war on.
Again, this is the movie I asked for. I may not be excited for all of Josh’s movie assignments at the outset, but I’ve enjoyed most more than the one I requested. As Mick Jagger wrote, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”
Enemy At The Gates is available for streaming on Netflix
Next week, Josh will be reviewing Nightcrawler. This was my pick for best screenplay last year (a dark horse to be sure). I really enjoyed watching it and thought it was one of the best films I’d seen in a while. Either way, Jake Gyllenhaal played one of the most intriguing characters of last year.
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