TENSE PLOT OF 'ENEMY' DILUTED BY LOVE TRIANGLE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

Military buffs have their favorite battles. For some, it's Napoleon's impossibly perfect execution of Austerlitz. Others find compelling drama in the tactical brilliance and desperation demonstrated at Gettysburg. And for the dear souls who delude themselves that studying war at its most absurdly wasteful could some day bring man to study it no more, World War I's great slaughters - Passchendaele, Verdun, the Somme - are hard to beat for sheer, unmitigated senselessness.

But if there is one battle that stands above all others in cost, savagery and pure importance, I can't think of one that tops Stalingrad. For the better part of five months (not counting the weeks of preliminary bombardments) in and around that decimated Russian city, the greatest evil in human history was finally stopped by one of its closest rivals for that ghastly distinction. And it's not too dramatic to say that civilization was saved in that blasted cauldron of steel and snow, where soldiers equipped with the best military technology of the day were reduced to the most atavastic methods of murder and survival.

``Enemy at the Gates'' captures some of Stalingrad's awesomeness, utter horror and endless irony quite well. The French director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, and a marvelous team of international craftsmen re-create the ruined city with appalling persuasiveness - every pile of rubble, and there are thousands, is a potential deathtrap. And it boasts terrifically apt details, especially when it comes to the Soviet authorities' do-or-die effort to hold, sometimes, a mere 150 meters of the west bank of the Volga with little more than flesh and propaganda against the full fury of the Nazis' Luftwaffe, Sixth Army and finest panzers.

But only one of the film's two narrative mainsprings could be called astute.

The good one involves a sniper duel between a Russian sharpshooter from the Ural Mountains (based on a real historical figure, Vassili Zaitsev, and played with Gary Cooper-ish stalwartness by the British actor Jude Law) and a steely German aristocrat (the less-historically confirmable Maj. Konig, played by the ever-impressive Ed Harris). Konig, who trains marksmen for the Wehrmacht, enters the crucible after Zaitsev's deadly aim - and the propaganda machine of Nikita Khrushchev (Bob Hoskins, having a pig-snortin' good time) - turns the handsome farmboy into a rallying hero for the near-defeated nation.

Stuff like this really happened, although doubtlessly not in the Hollywood-inspired way depicted here. Still, any Stalingrad buff will surely appreciate the cat-and-mouse, near/close encounters between Zaitsev and Konig in that wrecked department store and unconquerable ruin of a tractor factory where so much of the battle seesawed (the film was mostly shot in the former East Germany). And Zaitsev's initial entry in Stalingrad on the Volga River convoy that the Luftwaffe used for a shooting gallery is a decent enough effort to reference the ``Saving Private Ryan'' D-Day sequence.

Of course, every day in Stalingrad was more or less like D-Day from mid-September 1942 to the final German collapse in early February the following year. And by not keeping his film focused on this infinitely dramatic fact, Annaud proves himself to be, well, a Frenchman. No Vichy jokes intended; what I mean is, he finds it necessary to ``humanize'' the historic inferno by tossing in, of all things, a dopey love triangle between Zaitsev, his communist official best friend Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) and Tania, the last hot babe left standing in Stalingrad, played by Rachel Weisz.

Now, could something like this have really happened? Theoretically, sure; between Stalin's idiot refusal to let civilians evacuate his namesake city until it was much too late and the many females in the Red Army, romances must have blossomed and jealousies must have been piqued. But for Lenin's sake ... when moment-to-moment survival and the fate of two monstrous nations and the world were everybody's primary concern, why build half your epic war drama around so picayune a plotline? That's what the balmy North African theater was for.

Of course, the entire scope of the Stalingrad conflagration could hardly be condensed into a single movie. But one would have hoped that, with more time concentrated on what mattered, Annaud might have gotten a better sense of just how important Stalingrad was to World War II. The film ends on the eve of the Red Army counterattack, many miles to the west, that trapped the Germans with their own backs against the never fully secured Volga bank, but doesn't explain how much more than one decent fellow's fine shooting it took to turn the tide against Hitler forevermore.

``Enemy at the Gates'' does, however, pay worthy tribute to the sacrifice and suffering that such historically necessary hell required.

``ENEMY AT THE GATES''

(Rated R: violence, sex, language, children in jeopardy)

The stars: Jude Law, Ed Harris, Joseph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Bob Hoskins.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Written by Annaud and Alain Godard. Produced by Annaud and John D. Schofield. Released by Paramount Pictures.

Running time: Two hours, 11 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Three stars