7. Enemy At The Gates
Paramount PicturesJean-Jacques Annaud's 2001 war movie Enemy at the Gates focuses on the events surrounding the Battle for Stalingrad, undoubtedly one of the most bloody, drawn-out conflicts from the Second World War. Starring Jude Law as the real-life Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev it plays out as a one-on-one battle of wits and accuracy between him and German marksman Major Erwin Konig (played by Ed Harris). Perhaps only audiences in America really took to the action depicted on screen, since Enemy at the Gates managed to offend both Russian and German audiences at the time of its release. In Russia, some Stalingrad veterans were so appalled that they called on the Russian Dumas to ban the movie entirely, while German critics lambasted it as both an oversimplification of history and a glorification of war (a charge which could be leveled at any number of Hollywood movies). In the filmmakers' defense, the film was always intended as a fictional work based on true events rather than an historically accurate portrayal of events, but herein lies the danger of taking truly disturbing events and twisting them for the purposes of entertainment - there will always be people who were there at the time who take offense at the horrors of war being trivialised in such a way.