Excellent adaptation.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Call me stupid, but when a movie is somewhat exciting, has good special effects, great costumes, and good cinematography, I get annoyed when all that is flushed down the toilet and the entire movie changes from "pretty good" to "garbage" in the span of 15 minutes.After a battle scene, the main character disappears until the very last minute of the movie. We're fast-forwarded 2 weeks to the end of the war, "treated" to a boring, drawn-out surrender ceremony, made to watch the German generals eating dinner for 3 minutes (why?! for the love of god), and then the movie ends. Leaving a slew of questions unanswered. But not until we see an aging Hitler explain that "mankind's natural state is war." Wait, Hitler survived WW2? Sigh.Now you may say "oh, it's an allegory," or "it's cerebral," but I want to watch something semi-satisfying and not have the rug pulled out from under me and not have everything that was built up just disappear with no conclusion or even explanation.Stupid. Waste of time. It had such potential too.

A metaphysical Russian war movie set on the Eastern Front. While featuring realistic battle and hospital scenes and lots of military hardware, it is actually a "war fantasy" because of the nature of the two antagonists: Ivan Naydenov, an amnesiac Russian tank crewman who is miraculously healed of his injuries and claims to have a mystical affinity with tanks, and the mysterious ghostly White Tiger that is wrecking havoc on the Eastern Front and that he is tasked with destroying. A third protagonist is Naydenov's commanding officer, Major Fedotov, who serves as the "everyman" giving the human perspective on the drama.Very different to the style-over-substance approach of Western and especially American war movies; instead of endless incompetent Nazi soldiers blown away down by our heroic protagonists (*cough* Fury *cough*), this is a meditation on the nature of good and evil, and on the Russian people's resistance to Hitler's Fascism (of course they had their own totalitarianism to oppress them but that is ignored).Not the easiest movie to understand, and slow towards the end, but one that really gets you thinking about important themes.

This is a pretty good film, especially considering that it's Russian. I strongly suggest watching it in Russian with English subtitles, and not the American English dubbed version. It's very distracting because the volume and inflection of the voices just don't match what's going on in the scenes.The acting is a little stiff (did I mention that it's Russian?), but the realism of the tank action is almost on par with Fury, and there's a lot more of it than in Fury. There are also a few propaganda elements that confirm the fact that you can take the film maker out of the Soviet Union, but you can't take the Soviet Union out of the film maker. Specifically, the film takes place in the Soviet Union near the end of the war. The problem is, there wasn't any fighting in the Soviet Union near the end of the war. It was all being done in Germany, because by April the fragmented German Ninth Army was down to about 110,000 men and was in headlong retreat from the Seelow Heights in front of over a million men of the 1st Belorussian Front.This film almost has a sci-fi feel to it. At the beginning, the main character is found in a tank with third degree burns covering 90% of his body. He not only survives, but three days later he is fully recovered, except for amnesia that never goes away, and there are no signs of the burns. This is discussed throughout the film, so it factors into the story, but it's never explained. Another part of the mystery that is never explained is how the Tiger can wipe out a company of Soviet tanks that are coming at it, and not receive any damage.SPOILER: Near the end, the Tiger and the main Soviet tank are disabled during a shoot-out with each other. They both back off, then the film abruptly cuts to the German surrender to the Soviets, then a brief philosophical discussion on war between two men sharing a drink in a room with a fireplace. There is never any resolution to the tank battle, nor is there any reason given as to why the Tiger was so supernaturally powerful. The surrender is more propaganda, because the Germans surrendered to the Americans and British, not to the Soviets.

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.