Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Maybe the best war movie ever made is Russian

I thought about posting this on Memorial Day weekend but the fact that White Tiger is a Russian (post-Soviet, 2012) movie made me reconsider.


IMDB.com summarizes it thus:
Great Patriotic War, early 1940s. After barely surviving a battle with a mysterious, ghostly-white Tiger tank, Red Army Sergeant Ivan Naydenov becomes obsessed with its destruction.
Which is true as far as it goes, but this is not just a duello movie of two single-focused, even near-fanatic tank crews gunning for one another. It's not a land-borne version of The Enemy Below. White Tiger is a penetrating inquiry into war and the human condition. The German tank and the Russian protagonist are archetypes not just of soldiers anywhere, but of fallen humanity itself. Fortunately, you can watch the whole movie, subtitled in English, right here. It seems its copyright does not extend to the United States (update: it is also now in Amazon Prime).

 

At the very end is a monologue by Adolf Hitler, speaking to an unidentified man couched in shadows. Despite the identity of the speaker - and the screenplay's words in his mouth are reflective of what Hitler said and thought - the monologue is quite thought provoking, coming as it does following the last view of the Russian tank we see, and why and how we see it.

This is a very serious, compelling work of cinema. I hope you will agree.

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