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Posted on 01/17/2026 1:28:27 PM PST by pierrem15
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The combat scenes are very well done because the director films them almost exclusively from the perspective inside the Tiger tank. Doing so, he manages to reproduce the stomach-churning claustrophobic tension of Das Boot, a praiseworthy accomplishment in and of itself. The crew of a tank, apart from the commander, has historically been nearly blind with even the gunner and driver having very narrow fields of sight. The film captures that aspect very well, especially the iron trust the crew must place in the commander knowing what he is doing as he directs the tank to move and fire.
That blind trust brings out the most important aspect of the movie: the relationship of the crew to each other and the commander as the tank takes on a strange mission reminiscent of Apocalypse Now, only in a tank on the Eastern Front. The character development is excellent and the acting equally so. The horrors of war are shown, and Nazi atrocities, but usually indirectly or through visual evidence of past events. There is no pornography of violence as in many recent Hollywood productions. Many of those past events pop up from the beginning in brief flashback sequences that are resolved at the end. The ending is surprising, and if you expect a colossal, violent denouement you will be disappointed. Instead, you get a slow traversal of a haunting landscape into a bunker that I think deliberately recalls the beginning of Dante’s Inferno.
The primary focus of the film is the characters' trust in command and what that means in terms of moral responsibility. The film makes clear that one of the responses to the stress of combat and leadership is, “I was only following orders.” The movie illustrates that the ultimate consequence of this approach is moral and physical death. By putting the story in a tank, with the blind trust the crew must put in the commander, this moral point about rule and order following is raised in a sharp but not simplistic manner. It would have, of course, particular resonance for Germans not simply because of Nuremberg but because that’s how Germans seem to think about morality, based on my experience living there and what you see in the press. Many discussions hinge on claims about international law, German constitutional law, ordinary law and moral rules. The film raises the issue of how this can become simply an evasion of responsibility while pointing out that the micro-society of the tank and the general society absolutely need a rules-based order. It’s not a simple problem. Simply and blindly following orders may require physical courage but can devolve into moral cowardice. Universal rules and obedience may be necessary but require individual character to be implemented morally. A rather sophisticated message for any film these days.
If you are a student of military history, there’s another issue that also becomes apparent in thinking about this film. Prussian and then German military doctrine placed great emphasis on maneuver and flexibility in individual command: Auftragstaktik or mission command. German officers had great discretion in how they could succeed at a mission: they even had the ability to disobey direct orders if they thought of a better way to accomplish the mission. Of course, great woe would fall upon any officer who did so and failed. But the formal ability to ignore rules in pursuit of the mission shows something important about this flexibility: the mission reigned supreme. In effect, this meant the rules could be ignored (including the moral rules) to accomplish the mission.
Other aspects of Prussian/German military doctrine also expedited a recourse to atrocity: the emphasis on maneuver led to the implementation of a very thin logistics tail, requiring “requisitioning” of local resources and, especially, no tolerance for any partisan activity that endangered logistics and communication. Even during the Franco-Prussian War, one of the main responses of the Prussian army to any “franc-tireur” or French infantry in a village was to raze the village to the ground with artillery. In WWI, there was the famous Louvain massacre and burning of the medieval city in retaliation for an alleged sniper attack (in fact, German troops may have fired at each other). And also the use of tens of thousands of Frenchmen as forced labor in the occupied territories and the wholesale looting of theses territories of food and industrial equipment. The emphasis on speed and accomplishing the mission at all costs and ignoring rules (including moral rules) meant that the individual initiative of Auftragstaktik already encouraged atrocity, even without the ideology of brutality encouraged by Nazism.
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I enjoyed the movie up to the very predictable supernatural reveal that I’ll avoid spoiling for those who haven’t seen it yet. Stuff like that ruins a picture for me, but the rest of the movie is well done and worth watching.
I didn’t see the ending coming. I usually do. I guessed it, but rejected it.
Saw this the other day
amazing
Ya gotta sign up for prime. I’m not into free trials.
I think the main problem is that the supernatural elements are introduced too quietly and then it's shocking. But since the film is shot from the characters' perspective, maybe that's part of the point.
For maximum enjoyment, suspend all disbelief.
Pretty colors
Netflix will remake this one as “The Pink Panther”.
bookmark
tried to watch it: stupid nonsense ... open campfires at night in no-man’s land, children’s ghost stories, not a single enemy [or any other person] in no-man’s land [which was pristinely beautiful summer, NOT bitterly cold February when German army withdrawal attempted], one mine blowing up blows up an entire field of mines, and then tiger tank driving across river 100% underwater with no air-intake snorkel and no exhaust snorkel, and OBVIOUSLY, OBVIOUSLY NOT leakproof ... quit watching after that ...
“”tried to watch it: stupid nonsense ... open campfires at night in no-man’s land, children’s ghost stories, not a single enemy [or any other person] in no-man’s land [which was pristinely beautiful summer, NOT bitterly cold February when German army withdrawal attempted], one mine blowing up blows up an entire field of mines, and then tiger tank driving across river 100% underwater with no air-intake snorkel and no exhaust snorkel, and OBVIOUSLY, OBVIOUSLY NOT leakproof ... quit watching after that ...””
***
Ok. NOW I’ve got to watch it. I was gonna pass on it, thinking it was just another boring, ssdd war flick.
Thanks a lot! (/s)
I don't mind spoiling it for everybody. He wakes up at the end and realizes it was all just a dream.
And in the ending credits, right after it says "The End", a question mark appears.
And you're like, whaaaat?"
You're welcome.
It felt to me more like the filmmakers couldn’t come up with a realistic ending for the story so they resorted to a deus ex machina solution, i.e. the hero’s actually been dead and in Hell since the end of the first act.
Achtung – Panzer!
Queueing it up right now!
It's not a great war movie in terms of overall technical accuracy (trying to use compass inside a tank really stretched credulity for me), although I would say the combat sequences shot from inside the tank were very good indeed.
I would point out that the film itself though sometimes deliberately plays up the incredulity as part of the plot.
I read a review that said it was like “Apololyspe Now” only in a tank and with a worse ending. I think that is a pretty good summation.
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