The duel is made more complicated when Vassili meets Sacha Gabriel Marshall-Thomson , a boy of 7 or 8 who moves like a wraith between the opposing lines and is known to both snipers. Vassili falls in love with Tanya--and so does Danilov, and this triangle seems like a plot device to separate the scenes that really interest us. Sacha serves as a useful character, however. As a child of war, he is old beyond his years, but not old enough to know how truly ruthless and deadly a game he is involved in.
His final appearance in the film brings a gasp from the audience, but fits into the implacable logic of the situation.
Here he shows the Nazi sniper as a cool professional, almost without emotion, taking a cerebral approach to the challenge.
The Russian is quite different; his confidence falters when he learns who he's up against, and he says, simply, "He's better than me.
Is the film also about a duel between two opposing ideologies, Marxism and Nazism? Danilov, the propagandist, paints it that way, but actually it is about two men placed in a situation where they have to try to use their intelligence and skills to kill each other. When Annaud focuses on that, the movie works with rare concentration. The additional plot stuff and the romance are kind of a shame.
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Reviews Enemy At The Gates. Roger Ebert March 16, But Vassili eventually starts to feel that he can not live up to the expectations on him.
He and Danilov fall in love with the same girl, Tanya, a female soldier. In the winter of , the German and Russian Armies meet in the great Battle of the Stalingrad, one of the most vicious engagements of the Second World War.
Enter into this horror a young Russian soldier, formerly a peasant boy with an extraordinary ability to sharpshoot a rifle from far distances. The Russian sniper soon gains fame after killing a record number of German officers causing the Germans to bring in their own sniper expert: a war weathered Major who always accomplishes his mission no matter what the cost. With the Battle of Stalingrad raging around them, these two men must now fight each other. Sign In. Also true was the use of blocking detachments of troops of the Peoples' Commissariat of Internal Affairs NKVD to shoot soldiers retreating without authorization.
On the other hand, this movie gets some things wrong. The director has Nikita Khrushchev in charge of the battle from a bunker in Stalingrad. True, Khrushchev was on the military soviet of the Stalingrad Front, but he did not play a prominent role in orchestrating the battle; in fact once the front headquarters came under German fire in the early phases of the battle Khrushchev personally begged Stalin for permission to evacuate the headquarters to the far side of the Volga.
There is no mention of Marshal Yeremenko who did command the front or of General Chuikov who directed the 62nd Army in the battle for Stalingrad. Other than a fictitious general who commits suicide in the beginning of the movie under pressure from Khrushchev, the military chain of command does not exist in the movie. There were no sergeants or officers to receive the men when they got off the boats nor to lead them into battle.
Zaitsev seems to operate with no supervision other than that of the political officer. This is seriously inaccurate. One also may wonder why although we are given two women snipers, they never shoot anyone, whereas in fact Soviet women snipers are credited with over ten thousand enemy killed.
The movie erroneously credits the political officer with coming up with the idea to stop using punitive measures against defeated and demoralized Soviet soldiers and instead creating heroes for them to give them hope. The army had begun promoting heroes as role models in the first week of the war, and although NKVD blocking detachments had existed from the beginning of the war, only in August , weeks before the battle for Stalingrad began, did Stalin issue the highly unpopular Order no.
0コメント