Enemy at the Gates

"The one with the rifle shoots. The one behind him follows. When the one with the rifle gets killed, the one behind him picks up the rifle and shoots." According to Enemy at the Gates, these were the last words heard by many Soviet soldiers as they ran into Stalingrad to fight the invading Germans. If they continued into the city they were cut down by machine gun fire; if they hesitated or retreated, they were shot by their own officers.

It’s late 1942, and a Russian named Vassili, played by Jude Law, is among those soldiers. He is an excellent shot with a rifle, and this fact saves his own life and that of a political officer named Danilov, played by Joseph Fiennes. At this time, the leader of the Soviet defence is Nikita Khrushchev himself, played here by Bob Hoskins, and when he demands ideas from the surviving soldiers, Danilov comes up with a scheme of printing morale-boosting propaganda centred around Vassili’s marksmanship as a sniper. This is just what the Soviets need, and the Germans know it. In an attempt to remove Vassili, they bring in their own expert sniper, a man called Konig, played by Ed Harris. The bulk of the film is about Vassili and Konig trying to take each other out, and focuses on each man’s ingenuity. While Konig uses a young boy to get information about Vassili’s movements, Vassili uses his wits, and employs such clever tactics as using broken glass and reflected sunlight to outsmart his opponent. Which one survives? I’ll leave you to discover that for yourselves.

The story also includes some romance; both Vassili and Danilov fall in love with the same girl, and in one particularly sad scene, Vassili has sex with her on a dirty floor, surrounded by sleeping soldiers and damp walls.

Enemy at the Gates clearly shows the insanity of war and how no one really wins in the end. After all, what is so victorious about thousands of dead bodies lying in pits surrounded by piles of rubble and twisted metal? Nothing that I can see.

I suppose most people think of the Nazis as the bad guys, and the Soviets were hardly flavour of the month with many people either, yet while watching Enemy at the Gates I realised that I couldn’t tell who was the bad guy anymore. They were all really just people like you and I, living at a crazy time, doing an insane job that they had no real choice about. The only thing to do was to try and stay alive until the war was over.