As I did with Fury, here’s a review of another movie that follows a tank crew driving deep into enemy territory. But instead of an American Sherman driving deep into Germany in 1945, it’s a Soviet T-55 taking a wrong turn in Afghanistan in 1982.
Title: The Beast (AKA The Beast of War)
Director: Kevin Reynolds
Writer: William Mastrosimone
Starring: George Dzundza, Jason Patric, Steven Bauer, Stephen Baldwin, Don Harvey, Kabir Bedi, Erick Avari
IMDB entry
The movie starts with three Soviet tanks blowing the shit out of an Afghan village, taking down a minaret, slaughtering unarmed civilians and even poisoning a well. One mujaheddin who manages to score a Molotov cocktail kill against one of the tanks is then positioned and crushed to death under the tread of the tank commanded by the hard-ass/borderline insane Daskal. (The genocidal brutality of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is well documented.)
Inside the tank, Jason Patric’s Konstantin play Mr. Christian to Daskal’s Bligh. He’s not a fan of the war, and doesn’t understand the contempt Daskal has for Afghan subordinate Samad (Erick Avari). “He’s doing his best he can, sir.” “That’s what worries me.”
Outside the tank, a posse of Afghans, carrying a lone RPG launcher and intent on Badal (revenge), pursues the tank, which has taken a fatal wrong turn into a long dead-end valley. The tank’s crew has to struggle not only against mechanical breakdowns (a busted radio, low fuel, overheating) and pursuing enemies who know the terrain better than them, but a brutal commander who seems willing to kill any of them to keep his tank moving. Eventually Daskal executes one and leaves another for dead, which turns out to be his undoing…
This is an excellent, taut war drama that delivers on the promise of its setup. Daskal may be insane, but he’s not stupid, and he knows how to use his tank against his enemies. Performances are universally good. Unlike Fury, The Beast eschews cliches and never drags, because it never stops for pithy speeches on how War Is Just No Damn Good, because it’s already shown you. It’s a very solid, small-cast film that runs a sprightly hour and forty seven minutes long, and is well worth tracking down on DVD or streaming.
Here’s the trailer, which is much lower quality than the movie:
Russian brutality is in the news again, with numerous reports of indiscriminate killing of civilians and wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure. But while the Russians have been demothballing old Soviet tanks to send to Ukraine, they haven’t become desperate enough to send T-55s to the front lines, assuming they still have any that are able to run…
Tags: Afghanistan, Communism, Military, movie review, movies, Russia, Soviet Union, T-55, tanks
The Russian way of war is utterly wasteful of resources and manpower.
In Afghanistan, nearly every single deployed Soviet soldier wound up hospitalized for things that Western armies regard as 19th Century problems. The litany of horrors for any Western professional soldier begins with things like basic field sanitation discipline, supply, and ends with the blatant disregard for any human lives involved whether enemy or friendly.
Lester Grau had a lot of things that he fully documented, and which modern Russians will deny, deny, deny, outraged that anyone would consider them less than capable. The reality? Grau only touched the tip of the iceberg.
Russia is running out of manpower, ammo, and all sorts of things. It won’t end well, for them or any of their victims.
Brutal honesty has to acknowledge that the Communists weren’t the heroes they made themselves out to be; they were kleptocrats from the beginning, and built their nation on those principles. The Holodomor happened mostly because they had to get foreign exchange to pay for industrialization that they couldn’t do on their own, and when you go back and look at the economic underpinnings of it all, it was all looting, all the way down. The Russians like to whinge and complain about how the US “tricked” them into the post-Soviet economic decline that happened, but the raw facts were, they did that all on their own. All they know is how to be criminals, on the small scale and the large. This is why they’ve actually gone backwards since the Soviets, and the Ukrainians have managed to eke out a better standard of living.
To a degree, I lay off a lot of the Russian-Ukrainian angst on the Russian oligarchy not being able to tolerate having Ukrainian neighbors who’re doing better than they are, because if the Russian populace ever gets the idea that they don’t need the oligarchs and could do better without them…? They’re screwed. So, they have to rid themselves of that whole potential issue.
There are reports I’ve seen of how the Russian soldiers are shocked at how much better the Ukrainians are living, than they are. This is mostly because they’re mostly from the provinces, which Moscow is still looting to support their better lifestyle.
End of the day, I think the war is going to end with most of the Russian Federation collapsing and leaving Moscow’s control. Siberia and the Central Asian bits are going to wind up under Chinese control, and who knows about the rest? I would bet money on Karelia and a lot of Northern Russia going either independent or petitioning to join one or another of the Nordics.
Concur with this review. Not an inspiring movie. The good guys win though everyone is pretty much exhausted by death at the end. Good acting and script.
[…] when I reviewed The Beast, I said “While the Russians have been demothballing old Soviet tanks to send to Ukraine, they […]