“I am a stone.” —Enemy At The Gates (2001)

“Sniping, as far as I know, is recognized as a legitimate means of warfare. And yet, there is something sneaking about it that outrages the American sense of fairness. The American soldier had little feeling against the German soldier who fought an open fight and lost. But his feelings about the sneaking snipers can’t be put into print.” —U.S. journalist Ernie Pyle, ca. 1944, a year before he died from a sniper’s bullet

We get it, already: Modern warfare is random and without glory. We’ve been telling that story in every medium, including film, since total warfare and the gun strode the battlefield hand-in-hand and gave peasants with six months of firearms training the ability to massacre heavily armored, mounted noblemen. Every film about modern American war, from Glory to Saving Private Ryan to Full Metal Jacket to Platoon to Black Hawk Down all dispense with human life with a matter-of-fact abruptness. There is the pervasive and nasty assertion, everywhere, that the individual soldier has no power over anything—no ability to see his target, much less know for sure if he’s accomplishing anything at all.

Hovering above it all, still in the midst of the frenetic action, confident in the midst of the chaos, unafraid in the midst of the fearful, is the sniper. Cool, precise, seemingly invincible, he racks up hundreds of kills with clinical detachment and without a scratch on his person. We’re simultaneously awed by his skill and repulsed by his ability to gun down an enemy unawares.

And that’s what film has so tightly latched on to: The skill. Here is a modern soldier whose skill matters. Snipers, wrote Andy Dougan in his history of British snipers Through the Crosshairs, are often excused normal duties and allowed to go where and kill who they will. They have, as he put it, more control over their fate.

Since a calm, detached, highly skilled soldier who can pin down whole groups of enemies with a single rifle sounds like something that could just as easily describe a hero as a villain, it’s no surprise that film is full of thrilling sniper duels that pit two antiheroic marksmen against one another, their individual lives in the balance as a dirty war unfolds around them.

If you was to put me and this here sniper rifle anywhere up to and including one mile of Adolf Hitler with a clear line of sight, sir… pack your bags, fellas, war’s over. Amen. —Private Jackson, Saving Private Ryan (1998)

The sniper, first and foremost, is important.

At the beginning of Enemy at the Gates, a film that fictionalizes a sniper duel that historians regard as being highly dubious, Jude Law—who plays a British person playing Soviet sniper and propaganda hero Vasily Zaytsev—is a Red Army soldier in Stalingrad in one of the most violent and hopeless episodes in the war between Stalin and Hitler. Herded onto a boat and heading for a smoking, forlorn ruin of a battlefield, he barely survives as German fighters strafe his boat and his own officers execute men trying to run away. The comically underequipped Red Army declines even to give him a rifle.

It isn’t until he lays hands on a rifle (provided him by Joseph Fiennes, who plays a British person playing a Russian propaganda officer) that he finally becomes someone worthy and important—gunning down five Nazis unawares, using the ambient noise of the battlefield to mask his rifle’s report. Fiennes sees his worth and makes him a hero of the war.

“The snipers were the first specialized soldiers who had to possess a particular psychological aptitude,” Dougan wrote. “Mental strength was as important as physical competency.”

In real life, the sniper occupies the role of a kind of anti-hero. Many were resented by their own side for their tendency to attract enemy artillery, wrote one British marksman of his experiences in the First World War.

“The men loathed us, and the officers hated us,” said Bill Howell, a sniper in 1915. “We could watch through a loop hole for hours and when we were absolutely sure of a target, we would fire. Gerry knew it was a sniper, and he would let everything he had loose on that sector, and poor old Tommy had to take it.”

Enemy At The Gates chooses to tell a compelling story about one soldier’s use as (and resistance against being used as) a propaganda tool, set up inside the bounds of his tense duel with Ed Harris, who plays an American playing the apocryphal German sniper “Konig.” (Historical accounts can’t even agree on the guy’s name.) The film sets it up as a struggle of invader vs. defender, but also of Harris’ aristocrat vs. Law’s farm boy. Harris, the film posits, is easily the superior sniper: He lays vicious ambushes that kill Zaytsev’s teammates, lies in wait for hours pretending to be a corpse, and provokes his opponent by killing a child.

In the end, Zaytsev wins because somebody else sacrifices themselves to make Konig reveal himself. Hours after taking the shot he believes to have killed Zaytsev, Konig exits his hideaway and approaches, realizing too late that Zaytsev has him dead to rights.

It’s worth noting that, factually dubious though the fight between the two of them may be, Zaytsev really did exist, really was used as Soviet propaganda, really has been documented as an accomplished sniper, and this filmic end to his fight is certainly in line with other documented instances of a sniper duel coming down to such deception. The famous Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko was credited with more than 300 kills during the Second World War. An opposing sniper once missed her, but she decided to pretend to have been hit, falling out of the bough of the tree where she’d been hiding and then lying motionless for the better part of a day before the other sniper approached-whereupon she rolled over to her rifle and shot him dead.

It’s part of the movie sniper’s mystique that he often has some quirk or tic. Barry Pepper’s Private Jackson in Saving Private Ryan coolly recites prayers-to steady his aim or to soothe any guilt he may have at executing men from afar, we are never entirely certain. Zaytsev repeats a sort of Zen mantra his grandfather imparted to him as he hunted wolves in the mountains as a boy. We get the impression that there is more thought being put into these killings, beyond just the calculation of distance and wind speed.

That spiritual centering-or a sense of humor with his squadmates, as in Jackson’s case in Saving Private Ryan and Bradley Cooper’s affable portrayal of real-life Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle in American Sniper (2014)-is often how we’re clued in to the fact that this is the good guy.

Kyle rationalizes the awful stuff he has to do in the film (in dialogue lifted pretty much straight out of his autobiographical book) by explaining that his actions were in defense of his fellow troops. The opening set-piece of the film tasks him with shooting a child and a woman who are trying to deliver a bomb to blow up a column of U.S. troops in Iraq. (This happened differently in real life, according to Kyle: There was no child, but he did end up shooting a woman and he does credit it as being his first kill, as he says in the film.)

War is awful, the film is saying, but Kyle is only doing what he has to do to protect his comrades in arms. He’s doing the right thing, and, as we see when he returns home, he emotionally pays for it.

He’s the good guy, right?

The sniper must be able to calmly and deliberately kill targets that may not pose an immediate threat to him. It is much easier to kill in self-defense or in the defense of others than it is to kill without apparent provocation. The sniper must not be susceptible to emotions such as anxiety or remorse.

—U.S. Army Field Manual No. 23-10: Sniper Training, 1994

The bad guy snipers, meanwhile, are cruel sociopaths through and through. It’s perfectly fine to be disturbingly good at shooting somebody in the face from a half mile away, but you’re not supposed to enjoy it. In real life, Dougan wrote, a lot of snipers couldn’t handle the ugliness of shooting at somebody so far away they had no idea they were even being targeted.

“The game was dirty,” said British sniper Frank Percy Crozier during the First World War. “I had to give it up. The cool, calculating murder of defenceless men was diabolical.”

Not so Bruce Willis’ profoundly bloodthirsty assassin in The Jackal (1997). Willis enters into a battle of wits and rifles with Richard Gere, who has been brought in by authorities to try to prevent Willis from taking down a high-profile political target. Willis, of course, is far more fun to watch as he sadistically uses an engineer who designed a remote-control sniper rifle for target practice with said rifle and kills Gere’s love interest with a painful gut shot before drawing a heart on her cheek in blood. Willis plays the character deadpan, but it’s the kind of deadpan with utterly no humanity beneath any of it.

Zaytsev’s nemesis is a similarly cold and unfeeling cypher in Enemy At The Gates, sending one of Zaytsev’s own captive teammates out into the field dressed as a German to provoke the Russians to shoot and reveal themselves (though there’s no horrible payoff where Zaytsev finds out about this) and hanging a small child who he’s been pumping for intelligence the whole time.

Sniper duels, it’s important to note, happen in real-life warfare, though they seem not to be contests where the two combatants actually intimately know one another as in Enemy at the Gates or The Jackal-most of the time, it seems, they’re between two foes who only know that each has a good gun and a good eye. When that’s the case in films, the enemy sniper is just a maddening, far-off cypher or another terrible reveal.

Kyle’s nemesis “Mustafa” (another fictional duel-though Kyle did briefly mention the guy in his autobiography) is never really characterized, and his defeat at Kyle’s hands in the film is little more than a Really Long Really Accurate Shot. A Vietnamese sniper dogs main character Joker’s unit in Full Metal Jacket, luring American GIs out to help a wounded comrade so she can shoot more of them. She’s left completely anonymous until Joker stumbles upon her-finding her to be a pigtailed young girl who bleeds out as the whole squad looks down on her.

The Army manual quoted above notes that a sniper is an important tool in warfare-demoralizing the enemy and in many cases affecting how the enemy force might act. In film, taking the sniper out is a challenge that tests the resolve of everyone. Mistakes, carelessness or cowardice in dealing with him are punished with death in all the films I’ve mentioned so far. It’s a test of morals and methods-of determination and physical discipline and guts.

It’s easy to see how a soldier with such terrifying command of his enemy’s fate is such a fascinating topic for a film’s hero—or villain.