I assume that if one have experienced war only through video games this film will be
just another tank game. I've never played video games, but I did take part in a war in a tank unit. What we see in this film is even below the worst of the war movie trash we got used to see in the last decades and an insult not only to soldiers who fought real wars, but to any intelligent viewer. The idea that one can make a film based mostly on computer generated imagery and ignore any realism may work in a fantasy film, though the computer graphic in this and most modern film is so artificial and crude one can get nostalgic about the simple miniature models used in some films of the past century.
WW2 in Russia, the "Great Patriotic War" as it is known there, was an unparalleled tragedy with Russia (or Soviet Union as it was called then) loosing 27 million people, almost half of all the casualties of WW2. Hardly surprising that the war as a subject featured heavily in the post war film and literature. There were some great masterpieces and some poor propaganda films in the 30-40 years following the war but nothing as bad and mindless as those we see now. The "Liberation" film series released in 1970 was maybe one of the most expansive and realistic using hundreds of real tanks and thousands of troops. It was not a great film, but I cannot even start comparing it with this garbage.
"Destiny of a Man" the1959 Soviet film is as well about a Russian soldier captured in the first months of the war, going though a terrible ordeal in concentration camps and escaping 3 years later by driving (a car, not a tank) across the front line back to the Russian side. How one can even compare this masterpiece with the T-34? Maybe it came to my mind because of the superficial plot similarity. And now, 60 years later, with all the new technology all that we can make is an idiotic computer animation.
Review of T-34
