White Tiger

Now to start off with, if you are planning on watching this film expecting another typical war movie, then you might be disappointed! This surreal Russian film is more about courage and mental torture of war, with battle scenes taking a back seat. For that reason I really liked it.

The story kept me captivated and the characters were interesting enough to invest my time in. When the tank battles do take place, I thought they were superbly done, with the mysterious "White Tiger" having a scary and almost indestructible sense about it.

Now one can dismiss this powerful German tank as just that, or you can look deeper and see what it stands for. The director has created a very multi-layered film that will make the deep thinker feel as though he or she has had a good work out.

Not for everyone, but in a world of movies that lack creativity and originality, White Tiger comes highly recommended!

I very rarely get so scared watching a movie that I have trouble watching it. The depiction of all the gritty details of tank culture was superb. Every moment, every mundane scene had a heavy tension to it -- you never knew what was going to happen next.

The best thriller movies make good use of silence rather than cheesy background music, and this had those silent scenes. The story was kind of like Moby Dick transposed into the WW2 eastern front -- replace the great white whale with White Tiger and Captain Ahab with the mysterious tank commander. Be warned, the movie has a lot of burn victims depicted very realistically.

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 German 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.

As previous commentators have stated, this is an 'unusual' war movie. Despite having a quite good and accurate depiction of fighting on the Eastern Front, including depictions of lend-lease armour at the start of the film, it's the allegorical message that's the main point of the film.

In short, the battle between the White Tiger and the resurrected Russian tanker is an allegory of Russia's centuries old battle with invaders from the West (be they Teutonic knights, Napoleon or Hitler in this case).

The message of the director is that WWII was just another episode in this long struggle and that the White Tiger (western militarism) hasn't been destroyed in 1945, but is waiting dormant for the next episode....and the immortal Russian tanker will once again be there to confront the 'Tiger' again.

The film was made in 2012. Considering current events it's proved to be quite prophetic

Starts out as a perfectly good war flick and turns more and more surreal during the last thirty minutes. Or maybe I should say, it becomes a meditation over the meaning, the spirit, the essence of war. As a whole, White Tiger is like an episode of Twilight Zone filmed in the gritty philosophical manner of Tarkovsky - some faces and scenes almost appear like a nod to the protagonists of Stalker. It probably won't please those who watch this for the war part, and because marketed as a war movie, it probably fails to reach out those looking for the surreal and mystical. However, even if this film is an odd bag, it has the potential to leave a lasting impression on the viewer because the point it makes in the end (in the fireplace monologue scene) is utterly taboo-breaking with thoughts no Western-made WW2 films dared to express. 8/10 for a few sluggish scenes towards the end.