Enemy at the Gates (2001) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

You see, this is basically the same movie as Saving Private Ryan. It starts with a harrowingly accurate depiction of frightened men entering battle for the first time, then evolves into a story about how one guy won World War Two by himself. And we know that Jude Law couldn't have won WW2, because we already know Tom Hanks won it.

Now that I've gotten in my cheap shots, I should probably mention in passing that it's also one of the best damned movies made in the last decade.

The first twenty minutes are about as good as any filmmaking I've ever seen, every bit the equal to the opening of Saving Private Ryan. In the gray late Autumn, wide-eyed Russian boys are being ferried across the brown Volga to defend Stalingrad from the Wehrmacht, while their slow-moving scows are being assaulted from the air by the swiftly darting cream of the Luftwaffe fighter corps. Many die from the machine gun fire, while their neighbors are unharmed but terrified. Those who panic and jump in the water are shot by their own officers. When the survivors land, those capable of walking are herded by more officers into lines, to receive weapons, but there are only weapons enough for half of them, and one officer recites with a bullhorn "men without rifles, wait for the men with rifles to be killed, then pick up the rifles and move forward". They are herded further, and are told to charge across a city square, to a position held by German machine gunners. Most of them die. Those who do not, retreat, until their own officers start shooting at them with their own machine guns, yelling "go back. Death to cowards".

Powerful, powerful scene. 

The two men use their rifle skills, their wiles, intelligence and counter-intelligence to stalk each other through an urban landscape of burnt-out department stores, exposed sewers, sagging conduits, chemical factories, and the other bric-a-brac of a destroyed city, all the while simultaneously dodging the urban warfare which goes on beneath their feet, and the swarm of planes which continues to drop bombs from above.

Occasionally, we see the Stalingrad propaganda cadre and their boss, Nikita Krushchev. They maneuver in ways designed to help their careers as much as their country. Bob Hoskins plays Krushchev, with great panache and in multiple dimensions, not just as a monster, or as a country yokel, or as a naive Stalin loyalist, but as some of each, and also a shrewd politician and tactician with a human side.

That much was a brilliant movie, and if the movie had stayed focused there, I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone.

Unfortunately, they decided to muck it up (and lengthen it) with two sub-plots:

• A young Russian boy, perhaps ten years old, travels between the enemy ranks, planting bits of intelligence and counter intelligence here and there. We are first led to believe that he is conspiring with the Germans in return for food and supplies, but he turns out to have been planting disinformation. This sub-plot lacked credibility for several reasons: (1) the Nazi major is seen speaking to him alone. Exactly what language were they using to communicate? (2) are we supposed to believe that the Nazi was ever gullible enough to believe blindly anything a Russian boy would tell him about how to kill a Russian hero? C'mon now.
• They developed a completely irrelevant and distracting love triangle between the Russian sniper, the Russian propaganda commissar, and a lovely Russian Jewess (Her religion was very convenient for anti-Nazi speechifyin'.) This just added running time, and slowed the development of the main drama. We even see the propaganda guy dictating unflattering memos about the "hero of the Soviet state", presumably out of pure jealousy because the gal loves the sniper more than she loves him. I guess not just pure jealousy, but also out of sheer stupidity, since Krushchev already explained to the lad that since the propaganda officer actually created the hero, their fates and careers were inextricably linked. 

Bottom line: Brilliant opening scenes. Excellent and imaginative re-creation of the battle of Stalingrad and urban sniper warfare. Interesting study of the Russian political machinations. Beautifully acted. A very, very good movie that would be a masterpiece if trimmed of the silly and unbelievable sub-plots.

Of course, it should be good. Saving Private Ryan was good, and this is the same movie.

1. Thank heaven Hitler was a nutbag. He spent several months trying to finish off a city which was already bombed to ruins, burned out and nearly deserted, a struggle in which his mighty tanks were nearly useless. And he lost! Most war experts agree that if he had simply diverted all those troops to the oil fields in the Caucasus, that he would have cut off Russia from the oil it needed to fuel its army. Stalin's stubborn refusal to abandon the city was seen as folly by many contemporaries, but proved to be an important element in winning the war, less for Stalingrad itself, than in distracting Hitler from the oil.
2. Although Vasily Zaitsev, the Russian sniper, is a real historical character, the German Major played by Ed Harris is not. Some people say that there actually was a one-on-one showdown between Zaitsev and a certain German SS Colonel named Thorvald, who ran a sniper school in Bavaria. Neither German nor Russian records can confirm these details, and Zaitsev himself refused to confirm it. Many believe that the entire duel was fabricated by the Russian propaganda machine. (Zaitsev would not have been at liberty to deny the duel, of course, since Stalin said it was true.) For much more on Zaitsev and the sniper warfare in Stalingrad, see this link - a review of the book The War of the Rats