Vassili Zaitsev Was a Real Sniper. The Film Turns His Duel Into a Chess Match.

Enemy at the Gates opens on a river crossing under fire, and that is the film in one image: men sent forward with nothing, into a fight already lost. Jean-Jacques Annaud directed, co-wrote and produced the 2001 war film, working from William Craig’s 1973 nonfiction book Enemy at the Gates: The Battle of Stalingrad. The screenplay is by Annaud and Alain Godard. It runs 131 minutes. Twenty-five years on, it is a war film that keeps promising a duel and keeps handing you a history lesson instead.

Trailer, via YouTube Movies.

Vassili Zaitsev and the Volga

The setup is strong. Vassili Zaitsev, a replacement soldier in the Red Army, arrives east of the River Volga during the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942. He crosses into the city, is pushed into a human wave attack carrying only rifle cartridges, and takes cover with Commissar Danilov. With one rifle, he kills five German soldiers. Jude Law plays Vassili. Joseph Fiennes plays Danilov. The film’s main character is a fictionalized version of Vasily Zaitsev, a real sniper and Hero of the Soviet Union.

That opening is the best thing Enemy at the Gates does. The film understands that Stalingrad was not a battle so much as a grinder, and it stages the crossing and the charge with a blunt, ugly clarity. Then it stops being about the war and starts being about a legend.

Khrushchev, Danilov and the Newspaper

Nikita Khrushchev, played by Bob Hoskins, asks his subordinates how to improve morale. Danilov recommends inspiring hope rather than punishing in fear. He suggests reviving the army newspaper and publishing heroic tales of Vassili’s exploits. Vassili is transferred to the sniper division and becomes friends with Danilov. Both become romantically interested in Tania Chernova, a private in the local militia, played by Rachel Weisz.

Here the film finds its real subject, and it is a good one: the manufacture of a hero. Danilov does not discover a sniper, he builds one, and the film is at its sharpest when it watches that machine work. Danilov has Tania transferred to an intelligence unit, ostensibly to use her German skills on radio intercepts, actually to keep her out of danger. It is a small, jealous act dressed as strategy. The film notices. It does not do enough with what it notices.

Major König and the Duel

With Soviet snipers taking an increasing toll, Major Erwin König is deployed to kill Vassili and crush Soviet morale. Ed Harris plays him. When the Red Army command learns of König’s mission, after he wipes out Vassili’s sniper unit, they dispatch König’s former student Koulikov, played by Ron Perlman, to help Vassili kill him. König outmaneuvers Koulikov and kills him, shaking Vassili’s spirits.

The duel is the film’s selling point and its weakest stretch. Harris is a fine actor given almost nothing to play: a professional, a hunter, a man with a rifle. The tagline promises that “A single bullet can change history.” The film keeps that promise at the level of plot and breaks it at the level of feeling. Two men crawl through rubble. One of them dies. The film never makes you care which.

The supporting machinery is more interesting than the center. Danilov finds a boy, Sacha Filipov, played by Gabriel Thomson, who volunteers to act as a double agent, passing König false information about Vassili’s whereabouts in exchange for food. Vassili sets a trap for König and wounds him with Tania’s help. During a second attempt, Vassili falls asleep and his sniper log is stolen by a German soldier. The German command takes the log as evidence of Vassili’s death and plans to send König home.

Ranking what Enemy at the Gates gets right, in order of how much it matters:

1. The river crossing and the human wave attack, which make the stakes physical before they make them sentimental.
2. The newspaper plot, which turns propaganda into a character and gives Danilov something to do.
3. Bob Hoskins as Khrushchev, a rare burst of appetite in a film that otherwise stands very still.
4. Ed Harris as König, wasted by a script that mistakes silence for depth.
5. The romance, which arrives because the genre demands it and never earns a minute of its runtime.

What the Film Costs Itself

The cast is deep. Ron Perlman, Eva Mattes as Mother Filipov, Matthias Habich as General Paulus, Alexander Schwan as Young Vassili Zaitsev. The film is titled Stalingrad in France and L’Ennemi aux portes in Canada. None of that casting solves the central problem, which is that Enemy at the Gates wants to be two films at once: a portrait of how a nation manufactures a hero, and a cat-and-mouse thriller between two snipers. The first is worth making. The second is the one it keeps cutting back to.

Annaud has an eye for scale and no patience for interior life. The film is 131 minutes and still feels like it is skipping. It tells you Vassili and Danilov are friends, then has them compete for Tania. It tells you König is a legend, then gives him a log to chase. The writing by Annaud and Godard trusts the premise to carry the emotion, and the premise is not strong enough to do that alone.

The published critical score for Enemy at the Gates is 5.3/10, with a Metacritic score of 53/100. That is about right. This is a film with a great first act, a hollow middle and a duel that never lands. It is worth watching for the crossing and for Hoskins, and worth forgetting everywhere else.

Ed Harris · Enemy at the Gates · Jean-Jacques Annaud · Jude Law · Stalingrad · war films