Film - Philip Kerr on a dirty war that looks too clean

In September 1942, following days of heavy bombardment that destroyed much of the city, the German 6th Army began entering Stalingrad. Russian marksmen, armed with Moisan Nagant 7.62 bolt-action sniper rifles, destroyed the German ranks as they picked their way through the ruins. Russian war correspondents, desperate for some positive propaganda pour encourager les autres, quickly made famous a young hunter from the Urals credited with 42 kills during one ten-day period. When news of Vassily Zaitsev's sniping skills reached the Wehrmacht headquarters, the Germans sent for their own top marksman, a major named Koenig; and while the propagandists of either side awaited the outcome, these two snipers began a three-day duel among the skeletons of burnt-out buildings and the unburied bodies of dead soldiers. This is the story behind Jean-Jacques Annaud's new film, Enemy at the Gates.

The title doesn't feel right for this movie, based as it is only in part on William Craig's book of the same name, published in 1973, which dealt with the whole of the battle of Stalingrad. The superb recreation of the city, which is the central, stunning achievement of the film, reminds us only too vividly that, when the movie action commences, this enemy is already well past the gates and relieving himself in the ruins of the drawing room.

The war on the Russian Front cost the Soviets ten men for every one lost by the Allied forces on the Western Front. And right from the beginning of the film, it is not difficult to see why, when, unlike the soldiers landing on the Normandy beaches, only half the men in a battalion of reinforcements are given a rifle.

The first 20 minutes of this film will invite comparisons with Steven Spielberg's epic Saving Private Ryan, and, although Annaud's is the more ambitious film, in the final analysis, I think Spielberg's is still technically better. One thing certain is that, like Private Ryan, Enemy at the Gates needs to be seen on as large a screen as possible.

Of course, this kind of spectacle does not come cheap. Once again Hollywood proves to itself what the rest of us already know: that audiences don't want to go to cinema theatres to see films they might watch, with no loss of occasion, on their increasingly sophisticated home entertainment systems. Audiences want to go to cinemas to see spectacles such as this one, or Private Ryan, Gladiator and Jurassic Park - even The English Patient. Audiences want the full Norma Desmond ("I'm still big. It's the pictures that got small").

Enemy at the Gates gives you the big picture the way Norma would have preferred it, and the huge set pieces reminded me of David Lean, even of Victor Fleming's Gone with the Wind. The film is not without its faults, however, and while Enemy at the Gates can be described as a good war movie, it's not a great one to rank alongside La Grande Illusion, Paths of Glory, Lawrence of Arabia, Apocalypse Now or, best of all, Elem Klimov's breathtaking masterpiece of Soviet cinema Idi i Smotri (Come and See).

For Ed Harris and Joseph Fiennes (who plays Dani-lov, the war correspondent), General Chuikov's boast that he would turn the defenders of Stalingrad into "living concrete" looks as if it might have been taken literally - although, to be fair, the screenplay hardly gives Harris, as Koenig, much to work with.

Jude Law - almost unrecognisably thin at the beginning (and yet, unaccountably, slightly fatter toward the end) - is as charismatic as ever and looking like the heir proper to Burton and O'Toole, even if, here, his suburban Bromley accent might raise a few eyebrows.

Rachel Weisz quivers a lot and smiles nervously as Tania, although, again, she's not given much to work with; but she and Law do turn in the sexiest love scene in a movie since Julie Christie tugged off Donald Sutherland's Y-fronts in Don't Look Now.

Bob Hoskins plays Khrushchev as an angrier version of Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday. Every time he speaks there's "an eruption", and one always half expects him to pull off his shoe and bang someone's desk with it.

Ultimately, the story of two rival snipers isn't enough to sustain a picture of this size and, as a result, there's a lot of unrequited love directed from Fiennes to Weisz that looks unnecessary and which is, at times, more than a little confusing.

My biggest gripe is with the lack of dirt. Most of the time, the four principal characters look much too clean and well fed to be adversaries in the most ferocious and bloody battle of modern times. People are shot cleanly and die quietly. (Contrast with the sniper scene in Private Ryan for bloody realism.) With the notable exception of Ron Perlman, teeth look as if they were done in Harley Street. Bodies that have been dead for days look no worse than the sort of person one sees lying on the pavement outside the Groucho Club. Cannibalism - so fashionable these days, but a harsh necessity for the starving soldiers of Stalingrad - doesn't feature at all. (There was a moment when Fiennes handed Weisz what looked like a human arm wrapped in a newspaper, for her tea, but, disappointingly, it turned out to be a sturgeon.)

In truth, these are minor quibbles and Enemy at the Gates is as good a depiction of the Great Patriotic War as you are ever likely to see from Paramount Pictures. But if you want to know what it was really like - or at least experience a closer approximation - then you should try to get hold of Klimov's movie on video. Emotionally draining, Come and See is Brueghel as moving picture. And, unlike Enemy at the Gates, it's a film you are certain never to forget.

Enemy at the Gates (15) is out on general release

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