White Tiger is the most interesting World War 2 film I've ever seen that includes a blending of mild supernatural elements, with in this case, the Russian pushback against the invading Germans, during the last 18 months of World War 2. In a clear nod to Melville's Moby Dick, Aleksey Vertkov plays Ivan Naydenov, a badly wounded Soviet tank commander on the Eastern Front, who, after a miraculous recovery, becomes obsessed with tracking down and destroying a mysterious, invincible Nazi tank, which the Soviet troops call the "White Tiger".
The film begins as a fairly typical war movie, but as the narrative progresses it becomes increasingly allegorical in nature, but in an intriguingly, compelling manner. This is due to the great performances elicited from the whole cast, but especially Vertkov and Gerasim Arkhipov who plays Captain Sharipov, Naydenov's handler/supervisor so to speak, who becomes increasingly drawn in towards Naydenov's mystical approach, towards taking the battle up to a seemingly invulnerable and implacable foe.
If the film had just concentrated on this main thread, I feel director and co-writer Karen Shakhnazarov would have succeeded in creating quite a unique picture. The finished product is good, but unfortunately is padded out with unnecessary sub-threads that appear almost unrelated to the main story and adversely affect the pace of the overall film. It's not spoiling in saying that we are delivered a very long sequence in the third act dealing with Germany's surrender to the Russian Army in Berlin; a very long way from the fields of the Eastern Front and the White Tiger.
Then after what I thought was a good conclusion to the White Tiger story drawing parallels again with both the Moby Dick tale and even Arthurian legends of a resurrected defender returning to aid his country in an hour of need, another oddity occurs.
(A resurrected ?) Hitler suddenly appears for a fireside chat of at least 5 minutes with a shadowy interviewer, as he unnecessarily attempts to justify why his and Germany's actions would ultimately have been beneficial to Russia and its peoples. It's a pretty bizarre add on and I think is only there to provide further irrelevant exposition as to the dangers of militarism, a message, which had been more than capably transmitted earlier in the film.
White Tiger is a quite unusual war film that is still very much worth seeing, but in my opinion would have benefitted greatly from more stringent editing.
The film begins as a fairly typical war movie, but as the narrative progresses it becomes increasingly allegorical in nature, but in an intriguingly, compelling manner. This is due to the great performances elicited from the whole cast, but especially Vertkov and Gerasim Arkhipov who plays Captain Sharipov, Naydenov's handler/supervisor so to speak, who becomes increasingly drawn in towards Naydenov's mystical approach, towards taking the battle up to a seemingly invulnerable and implacable foe.
If the film had just concentrated on this main thread, I feel director and co-writer Karen Shakhnazarov would have succeeded in creating quite a unique picture. The finished product is good, but unfortunately is padded out with unnecessary sub-threads that appear almost unrelated to the main story and adversely affect the pace of the overall film. It's not spoiling in saying that we are delivered a very long sequence in the third act dealing with Germany's surrender to the Russian Army in Berlin; a very long way from the fields of the Eastern Front and the White Tiger.
Then after what I thought was a good conclusion to the White Tiger story drawing parallels again with both the Moby Dick tale and even Arthurian legends of a resurrected defender returning to aid his country in an hour of need, another oddity occurs.
(A resurrected ?) Hitler suddenly appears for a fireside chat of at least 5 minutes with a shadowy interviewer, as he unnecessarily attempts to justify why his and Germany's actions would ultimately have been beneficial to Russia and its peoples. It's a pretty bizarre add on and I think is only there to provide further irrelevant exposition as to the dangers of militarism, a message, which had been more than capably transmitted earlier in the film.
White Tiger is a quite unusual war film that is still very much worth seeing, but in my opinion would have benefitted greatly from more stringent editing.