Posted on 01/17/2026 1:28:27 PM PST by pierrem15
The Russian tank movie was better, more realistic.
Which Russian tank movie? White Tiger?
Der Panzer was good at the claustrophobic scenes. White Tiger was a mystical, but fun movie. He can talk to the tanks!
I’ll definitely check it out. IMHO Das Boot is one of the best war movies ever made.
Laz will hit it!
Not sure, just saw a brief out take on Youtube. Some Russian guys and a tank.
There was a great Polish series called “Four Tankmen And A Dog” (Czterej Pancerni i Pies).
“Odd Ball’’.
“To you New Yorkers a hero is some kinda weird sandwich!’’.
That thing drank fuel like no tomorrow.
From there it only got worse.
Not having red night lighting inside when buttoned up fighting at night took it lower.
The absence of light discipline, Driving two days and two nights with only one fuel refill, the fording scene, The windmill surrounded by taller trees, being ambushed by a single IS-152 with no supporting infantry or anything kept pulling the ranking lower and lower.
That having been said, it was incomparably better than the 1968 Battle of the Bulge.
The supernatural stuff reminded me of a fairly recent Russian movie in which an indestructable Tiger tank was actually a ghost. Both movies had their good points and both movies left me asking "What were they thinking"?
Bfl
Some of the scenery and settings were nice but it is not near the class of a Das Boot, Der Untergang, or Stalingrad.
IMHO Das Boot is one of the best war movies ever made.
Agreed.
Probably T-34.
Better then “Fury”.
I don't expect documentary levels of accuracy from a film-- there's always some amount of artistic license or constraints like lighting. Not everyone is a Kubrick who will have special licenses built to film by candlelight.
I was just happy the Tiger look like a Tiger without getting into details as to whether the early Ausfuhring with the deep fording was still available in 1943.
Still thought the combat sequences were good. I also think some of the improbabilities were deliberate clues as to the "supernatural" nature of the events.
SPOILER ALERT...SPOILER ALERT...SPOILER ALERT...SPOILER ALERT...SPOILER ALERT...SPOILER ALERT...SPOILER ALERT...SPOILER ALERT...SPOILER ALERT...SPOILER ALERT...SPOILER ALERT..SPOILER ALERT....SPOILER ALERT...SPOILER ALERT...’’’
OK, Fair warning.
It wasn’t a “supernatural” ending.
The entire mission was allegorical, including the opening preamble on the bridge. Did anyone think that the mysterious, unmoving deer on the bridge was something you’d find in the midst of an urban firefight?
I’d suggest that the ending is completely of a piece with the slew of off-kilter scenes leading up to it:
The mirrored massacres in the burning church and the burning factory.
The dying tankmen hinting that the mission was somehow a personal one for his lieutenant.
The tank operating underwater. (Yes, there were some designed for the expected invasion of Britain, but the odds of one appearing on the Eastern Front were slim to nil.)
The proliferation of decayed (some too quickly) corpses throughout.
The dead parachutist hanging from a tree in the middle of a forest.
The bunker in the middle of nowhere, unguarded by a single picket yet containing a massive subterranean world complete with its very own labyrinth (as if the name of the mission anticipated such a structure.)
The lance corporal leading the lieutenant only part of the way to his objective within the bunker, and saying as he does, “Don’t be scared,” and “Have courage,” to an officer(!)
The structure mirrors that used in one of the greatest short stories of all-time, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” by Ambrose Bierce. It doesn’t have the cinematographic clues that “The Tank” has, or the more overt philosophical trappings, but it shares a delayed, surprising resolution. Its text can be found here:
https://www.owleyes.org/text/occurrence-owl-creek-bridge/read/i#root-75217-6
A Frenchman made a short film of it in 1962, and Rod Serling played it in its entirety as an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” It has zero dialogue and is utterly harrowing. Here’s where you can see it:
By the way, Bierce was a fabulous war writer, a very outspoken atheist, and a practitioner of “trick endings.” Famously, he didn’t like what he called “lazy readers” who had to be spoonfed story lines and easy morality lessons. Based on that, I think he’d have loved “The Tank.”
Oh. Well that would explain a lot.
Agreed. Some of it may be budget related to the CGI pieces and not having a historian on hand to review the CGI. The historian didn't get to see the CGI until the same time as it was nearly a finished product and it was too late/expensive to go back and rewrite all of the code.
A realistic ending for such a film set in the autumn of 1943 would have been to confront overwhelming Soviet forces, after taking out many Soviet tanks to be destroyed and the entire crew killed.
An even more realistic ending might have been for the tiger to break down and be destroyed by the crew before reaching the front. Then for the crew to be pressed into an ad-hoc infantry unit and killed.
Fury was idiotic. You should read the comments on the film about stupid stuff.
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