No doubt the title is an indication of what the film would LIKE to be about. The Germans forces were indeed "at the gates" - they are on the verge of capturing Stalingrad, they would lay siege to Leningrad, and at one point even Moscow appeared to be in danger. The situation was desperate. But after we're told all this, the position of the German army turns out to have no more to do with the story than the position of the sun in the zodiac. After a bitter, violent battle over - well, we're never told - nothing of a military nature happens again. Not even offstage. (Until the end, when, after a brief "offensive" of unfathomable significance, an epilogue tells us that the Germans were repelled from after all.) All the action in Stalingrad freezes so that we can watch a protracted duel between a Russian and a German sniper.
Now I'm prepared to believe that snipers played a valuable role in this kind of warfare - I wouldn't know - but Vassili's primary value, we must assume in the absence of information to the contrary, is as propaganda - a means of keeping up the morale of the local troops. But there's something circular here. The snipers are the only people we see doing any actual fighting, and by the end of the film they seem to be devoting all their efforts to shooting a German sniper who is in turn doing nothing but trying to shoot Vassili. What does ANY of this have to do with, you know, the invasion?
The fact that the troops of a hostile foreign power are on Russian soil (they haven't yet been defeated, and it looks to be only a matter of time before even Moscow would be overrun) doesn't seem to motivate the characters to do much. Nobody makes a single decision for the good of the war effort as a whole. Danilov builds up the Vassili legend because of personal feelings and is ready to tear it down later for other personal reasons; Tania wants to kill Germans - kill them herself, by hand, rather than help her fellow soldiers as best she can by working in intelligence - because they killed her parents; Danilov tries to transfer her to a safer job not because that's where she should be (it's a mere coincidence that that IS where she should be), but because he's hitting on to her; Vassili's heart isn't in the duel with the German sniper until he has a casual acquaintance's death to avenge. When Sacha's mother is told that her son is a traitor (now serving the forces who have bombed the city she grew up in to rubble), her only reaction is, "Perhaps he'll be safer with them than with us." Wherever we look, we see dreary personal concerns. Did any of these people notice that the enemy IS at the gates?
If Anaud was trying to make his characters more plausible by making them pettier, he failed. When Sacha tells a third party what we supposedly already know - that Tania is in love with Vassili - it came as news to me. I hadn't seen any insipient love anywhere. I suppose I ought to have worked it out, by assuming that the single female character must be there to fall in love with someone and using a process of elimination to work out who it was (she plainly didn't care for one of the two candidates, therefore she must be head over heels with the other one), but really, even in a movie as dull as this, I have better things to do.
