Annaud does pull off one amazing sequence that takes you into the real Stalingrad, the stunning opening scene of terrified Russian troops crossing the Volga into the exploding inferno of the city. Reminiscent of the beach landing in "Saving Private Ryan," it's a tour de force that features, among other things, what must be the most terrifying ground's-eye-view depiction of strafing ever filmed. This scene raises the bar: It tells us that this movie is going to be intense and real, that it's going to have appropriate scale, that it's going to be faithful in some way to its subject. But after this brush with verisimilitude, the film quickly devolves into close-ups of Jude Law, Rachel Weisz and Ed Harris.

The potent new technology used in films like "Saving Private Ryan" and "Enemy at the Gates" is a double-edged sword for directors. It allows far more visceral depictions of war than ever before -- but if the film sinks back into sentimentality or falseness, the unreality and hypocrisy are even worse than in the old days. In the heyday of sentimental flag-wavers where the second lead died cosmetically, where machine guns didn't blow pieces of people's small intestines out their backs and the good guys always won, war didn't look or feel like war. These were basically stage plays, completely artificial: If their plots were equally artificial, as they frequently were, at least they felt all of a piece. But in the post-"Apocalypse Now," post-"Private Ryan" era, to give the audience a taste of war's hellish reality -- enormous subwoofers booming, computer-generated graphics blasting, mind-blowing editing and special effects jammed like a shot of speed into the audience's jugular -- and then suddenly modulate into the stilted universe of "For Whom We Serve" or whatever those treacly '40s war films were called, is a travesty. "Enemy at the Gates" is a textbook case of hyperviolence that is merely decorative. It sends the message that war is a blurred, meaningless horror except when it isn't, which is 99 percent of the time. This E-Z-Off naturalism is even worse than the old sentimental jingoism, because it doesn't have any formal excuse. It reduces carnage to a cheap thrill.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with focusing on a tiny piece of a huge battle. But there are ways of doing that that honor the larger story, like "The Red Badge of Courage." There are also ways of telling epic tales in a series of vignettes, as "The Longest Day" does. (Hokey as its patriotic music is, instantaneous as are its deaths, that blockbuster warhorse is still in places a pretty powerful film.) But "Enemy at the Gates" is completely about the made-for-Euro-Hollywood sniper duel: The Stalingrad ambience is just a bonus. It doesn't even pretend to honor the epochal battle that is its setting.

"Honor" may seem like an inappropriate word to apply to the attitude of a filmmaker toward his subject. But it is precisely that attitude, which cannot be quantified but which can be felt in every frame, that distinguishes the great war movies from those that are mere entertainments. They can be pro- or anti-war, patriotic or nihilistic, epics or miniatures; they can exalt the courage of a Prince Henry or wallow in the all-too-human cowardice of Falstaff. As long as they honor their subject, the audience will feel it. "Enemy at the Gates" could have succeeded on its own terms if it succeeded in making us care about the three characters it plucked out of the millions of souls caught in the cauldron: that too would have been an act of homage. But it fails atrociously. It takes one of the great and dreadful stories of modern history and sacrifices its epic scale for local melodrama. That isn't just bad, it's offensive.

But it will take more than a movie to kill the memory of Stalingrad. The obliterated city's ghosts live on, reminders of a horror beyond words that really happened. In our time. In a city of the damned.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"