Even with his boarding-school English accent, Law plays Zaitsev with a kind of poster-child erotic simplicity that suits Annaud's strange scheme perfectly. Although Fiennes gets top billing based on his "Shakespeare in Love" stardom, Danilov is a thankless and finally not significant role, a Dr. Frankenstein who is dwarfed by his creation and loses his girl (the sultry Rachel Weisz) to him. Although this romance is largely gratuitous, it does offer a sex scene in a crowded barracks that's so vivid you can virtually smell the rank piles of sleeping bodies around Law and Weisz. Annaud is not known as an expert handler of actors, but the enormous supporting cast features several eloquent performances, including Ron Perlman as a cynical fellow sniper and Gabriel Marshall-Thomson as a small boy who idolizes Zaitsev with disastrous results.

If anything, the latter portions of the film, though just as thrilling as the beginning, take us still further into stripped-down myth, as Zaitsev and his nemesis, a German officer named König (Ed Harris), stalk each other through Stalingrad's abandoned factories and looted stores. Again, many historians now presume the tale of Zaitsev's duel with a Nazi aristocrat to be fiction, but for Annaud it's the fiction that counts. These are adversaries out of Homeric legend or a John Ford western, men somehow greater than the societies that created them.

At first glance, Harris seems like a ludicrous choice to play a German; what actor could possibly be more consummately American in accent and manner? But as the almost honorable König, who may kill small children but genuinely regrets it, Harris provides an air of integrity, ambition and even sadness that is somehow just right. Throughout this oddly memorable film, which may baffle American audiences but surely won't bore them, the choices are big, brave, complicated, interesting. This is spectacle cinema made with individual flair; maybe someone in Hollywood will notice that it's still possible.

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