Enemy At The Gates Essay -- essays research papers

Enemy at the Gates, a film with intense violence and man’s inhumanity to man, tells the story of the triumph of love and friendship set amidst the brutality of World War II Stalingrad. It is the winter of 1942, and a desperate, poorly equipped and demoralized Russian army faces the possibility of crushing defeat by the might of the German blitzkrieg. A young naà ¯ve soldier from the Urals, Vassily Zaitsev, arrives in Stalingrad where he is thrust into battle amid the needless slaughter of his fellow soldiers be the Germans and his own troops. To his shock, he is not given a rifle to use during the attack. Instead, the men are paired together and one is given a rifle while the other is given extra ammunition. Vassily survives the first fierce assault and finds himself side-by-side with the political officer, Danilov. They are trapped among the bodies of fallen Russian soldiers behind the lines, and Vassily’s talent as a sniper, homed to perfection from a childhood spent hunting wolves with his grandfather, is realized by Danilov when Vassily calmly and methodically kills five German soldiers. Returning to the relative safety of Russian controlled sector in t he city, Danilov, a writer, glorifies Vassily’s exploits in a newspaper article. So begins the unlikely friendship between the highly educated political officer Danilov and the barely literate Private Vassily Zaitsev. Vassily is then elevated to the status of hero when Danilov suggests to an angry and demanding Nikita Krusc...