It's 1981 Afghanistan in the second year of the Russian invasion. Daskal (George Dzundza) commands a Russian tank. Konstantin Koverchenko (Jason Patric) is the driver. Samad is the translator. Anthony Golikov (Stephen Baldwin) and Kaminski are the others in the tank crew. After they raize a Mujahadeen village, the guerrillas seek their revenge. The tank gets lost in the desert.American movies often tackle various American wars. This was a time of Platoon and Rambo. Afghanistan was not well known at the time. This one tackles a Soviet war reminiscent of the worst of the Vietnam War. The brutality on both sides is compelling. There is solid tension. The characters on both sides are well-drawn. That gives it something more than a simple war movie. It's almost Shakespearean in nature.

It is 1981, the second year of the Soviet-Afghan war. After pulverizing an Afghan village, a Soviet tank takes a wrong turn and loses communication with its unit. Unfortunately for this tank it has entered a valley through a pass which is the only escape route. The anti-Soviet Afghan rebels did not take kindly to the brutal destruction wreaked by this tank, which they referred to as "the beast." The desire to avenge the attack is strong enough to unite a couple of feuding rebel tribes, and the story details the single-minded determination of the rebels to pursue and destroy the tank. In the process we get to know the five member crew in the tank as well as some of the rebels. There is a goodly amount of footage from the interior of the tank--claustrophobes beware.The tank commander is of the old school, having fought the Nazis in WWII at the age of eight. His obsession to get back to safety with his tank creates stress within his crew, to say the least. There is enough conflict in this movie to fuel several films--conflict among the tank crew, conflict among the rebels, conflict between the tank crew and the rebels. The pacing kept my attention throughout. The cinematography is outstanding. The desert landscape plays an important role and the camera uses it to great effect. The musical score contributes in establishing mood, but it is not intrusive. All of the actors were up to the task. Having the Soviet tank crew speaking in English was initially off-putting, but quickly ceased to be a problem for me. The Soviet-Afghan war proved that the Afghans are not easily subdued. Robert Gates (U.S. Secretary of Defense 2006-2011) has recently been quoted as saying that approximately two million Afghans were killed in the war and five million fled the country. What a disaster.The DVD I got from Netflix was single-sided with a 4:3 aspect ratio. The movie was filmed in wide screen and I think much would have been gained with that format, since the landscapes played such an important role.

One of the few Hollywood films (never mind 'Rambo III') to exploit the Soviet-Afghan war pits the crew of a wayward Russian tank against a handful of rebels bent on vengeance, with the beast of the film's title becoming the machine itself: a fully armored Goliath challenged by the sticks and stones of a primitive nation. It's a robust, masculine adventure, drawing heavily on the juvenile appeal of hardware and firepower, but with more guts than glory at the end of the pursuit and a surprising blend of character development balanced against all the military action. Mark Isham's atmospheric music score sets an effective mood, but it might have been a more challenging film (though of course less accessible) if the Russian troops had thought to camouflage their Southern California accents: it's as if they came through the Khyber Pass by way of Malibu Beach. The Afghan natives speak through subtitles, so why not the Soviet invaders as well?

This is by no means a bad movie but I still had some big problems with it.Problem I had with this movie was; who's side are we supposed to be on? In a nutshell it's a movie about a Russian tank crew against a bunch of Afghan Mujahedeen. Both groups don't exactly get portrayed as pleasant ones. It would had been OK if this had been a sort of realistic anti-war movie, that showed the horrors, pointlessness and madness of war and that showed there is no good and evil in war but the movie very much has a typical Hollywood action type of approach to the whole story. I actually think that Jason Patric was supposed to be the main 'hero' of the movie but he simply doesn't get featured prominently enough for that, especially not during the fist half. This to me made the movie a very distant one to watch. I couldn't care for any of the characters and I don't know what side I was supposed to cheer for.But honestly, it's still a pleasant enough movie to watch. Not as an heavy movie with a serious massage in it but more as a simplistic action flick. The movie does certainly has its moments, though I also still think they could had done far more with its concept, action and story-wise.The characters should had been developed way more and better. That way we might had perhaps cared some more about any of them and would had given the story and movie in general some more depth as well. It's not like they didn't had the right actors for it. The movie has some good actors in it, that are also some well known names in the business.An entertaining enough but ultimately pointless and bland little war movie.6/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/