White Tiger (2012)

That was an excellent one.

disgusting, overrated, pointless

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I really enjoyed this movie. Not for it's intense action scenes. Not for its sound mixing, but for its thoroughly thought out art direction and its dedication to historical accuracy. The costumes, landscape and tanks really showed the hard work and research put into this film. Side-note: (Possible Spoilers) I thought the fact that the personification of the Russian people through Aleksey Vertkov was perfect. His inner struggle and physical battle can be compared to the struggle of the Russian people through the early 1900's. The personification of evil in the white tiger was also very interesting. The fact that Aleksey said at the end, we have to destroy the evil or he will return furthers the personification and drives the point that they put thought into the scripting.

a Russian war film. classic recipes. well known story. the hero. the enemy. old virtues and values. and a bizarre end. because Belyy Tigr has the strange courage to be almost an experiment, special challenge. sure, the Great War is presented in same familiar spirit for the public of Soviet films. but it is only a start point. sure, the traces of action hero are not ignored. but the message is more profound. and it transforms the film in a kind of matryoshka doll. the fight becomes key to understand rules of history. the victory against enemy is source of any answer. the spectacular confrontation scenes are pretext for a never ending hunt. the super hero, new bogatyr, only part of a large portrait of deep sense of victory.an ambitious project. and proof of the high art of Karen Shakhnazarov.

First things first - if you expect a "standard" war film like Saving Private Ryan or Enemy at the Gates or Fury, then this is the wrong place to look. White Tiger is a Russian film set in the dying days of WW2. The titular AFV is a lone German tank which appears mysteriously on the battlefield and destroys Russian tanks by the dozen, whilst seeming invincible. No crew is ever seen, with the result that it feels like a mash-up between the great white whale from Moby Dick and the homicidal tanker in Spielberg's Duel.Hunting the tank is a character halfway between Captain Ahab and Ishmael; a Russian tank-man who makes a miraculous recovery from seemingly fatal burns, only to find that he has total amnesia. He only knows that he can talk to the souls of tanks, and that he must hunt the white tiger.Sounds odd? That's the point. The film is heavy on metaphor and mysticism, and in the latter third becomes deeply surreal. There's a scene of three German generals signing the document of surrender, then enjoying a strange meal. Then cut to a line of Russian PoWs; then to Ahab/Ishmael alone in a field with his tank. The white tiger hasn't gone, he says. It's merely hiding, and will be back in a hundred years or so. Then the final scene: is it real? Is it symbolic? Is it happening in someone's head? You decide.This is a cerebral film. It asks questions, and leaves the viewer to struggle for answers.In Russian, with subtitles.

I won't repeat what others have said already here, other than to agree that this is an excellent movie. I do think some reviewers make it sound more bizarre than I did. For the most part I found it to be a generally straightforward war movie, although with a mystery added to it that, in the final scenes, takes on a deeper meaning.For us non-Russians, the movie has a special interest in showing what the war was like from the Russian point of view. I do, though, want to mention one scene that stretches credulity just a little. When the war ends and the Germans surrender, the top German officers are given royal treatment, a dinner fit to have come from a very exclusive restaurant. I thought it would be their last meal and they would be executed immediately afterwards, but the movie gives no indication of that. While it might be possible that an incident like that did occur, I doubt that it was the norm. The victorious Russians were generally terrible in the way they treated prisoners, certainly before the surrender. And that is an enormous understatement. After the surrender German prisoners were marched off to do forced labour in Russia, only a small percentage of whom ever returned. And it was not just prisoners--the atrocities the Russian inflicted on German civilians were just as horrifying. Yet, to be fair, it was was payback for the equally brutal treatment the Germans soldiers meted out to Poles and Russians as they advanced in the early stages of their invasion.As a music lover, I have one nit to pick. The credits say "Music by Richard Wager." Yes, the little music in the soundtrack does use a snatch of a tune by Wagner, but to say it's "his" music--no, it's only a tiny fragment of the original and without his fabulous orchestration.As of today the movie can be found on YouTube with English subtitles.