The Beast of War

Not only does the Russian tank crew use American tank fire commands in a Soviet tank, they only use them correctly about half the time.

For instance, they correctly yell "up!" when the round has been loaded, but the proper warning when traversing the turret is to yell "Power!" while they use "Traversing!" In the cave scene when Koverchenko is fixing the broken RPG launcher, he has it cradled in his lap.

In the next shot, Taj is shown holding the launcher.

In the next shot, Koverchenko has it in his lap again.

At one point the gunner pulls the trigger and the main gun fails to fire (a mis-fire) The crew begins yelling, "Cook-off!" and jumps from the tank to take cover.

First - a cook-off occurs when a very hot breach causes a round to fire by itself, not at all what happened in this case.

Secondly, a misfire is indeed dangerous because you don't know if the primer was struck or the firing mechanism failed.

If the primer was struck, the round could still fire unexpectedly.

On rare occasions a primer can burn slowly for a bit, then go off.

The best place to be in that case is in the tank, clear of the breach.

(if the gun does fire the recoiling breach could maim or kill you if you got in the way - such as while scrambling around yelling, "Cook-off!").

Jumping out is a bad idea too, because if the gun fires the muzzle blast will mess you up.

So their drill was as wrong as it could be.

When they are tying Constantine to the rock, the wrap around wire frame of his glasses has come off his right ear.

A few moments later it is back in place around his ear (his hands are tied the whole time) In the scene after Hassan and Mustafa are talking in the captured Russian helicopter, when the Russian tank is moving, pointing the main gun opposite to his direction, a shadow of a person is moving into the frame from the left.

The "DSHK" machine gun on the tank is clearly an American Browning M2, modified to look like a DShK.

When they are traversing the turret manually as Konstantine and the Afghans are rushing towards the tank, we're shown a view of the muzzle of the tank gun, and the rifling can be very clearly seen.

The Soviet T-62 tank employs a 115mm smoothbore gun, which does not have rifling.

The "T-62" tank used in the film was actually a Ti-67 tank - an Israeli modification carried out on captured T-54 and T-55 tanks.

Russian Tanks do not run on Helicopter fuel, even if it did, 20 gallons of any fuel would be worth about 20 minutes not a full day and night of operations.

When the first round flies over the town and hits the hillside in the opening scene, a black dot can be seen at the exact spot of the fireball just prior to the explosion (pyrotechnics placed to simulate the explosion of the round).

The searchlight on the turret and the canvas around tank main gun change back and forth from damaged (from nighttime Molotov attack) to undamaged several times.

The hand grip on RPG has black tape over the serial# in cave but not during the closeup just prior to Koverchenko's shot at the tank.

The compass needle moves between closeups of the partially burned map (points NW first, then N in second shot), and compass moves from left side of map to right side before TC picks up map (left edge is blowing upwards in the wind as Daskal stands back up).

Several times, crew members are seen to load obviously American HEAT (High Explosive Anti-Tank) rounds in a Soviet tank.

The helicopter in the movie was an Aerospatiale Super Frelon, which was never in use with soviet armed forces.

However it bears a striking resemblance to the soviet Mil Mi-26 helicopter, therefore it was used as stand-in.

The women are conversing/speaking in Hindi, which is totally unrelated to the locale where Pushtu is the native language.

Just after being wounded, uncle Akbar shoulders his weapons twice while talking to Taj.

How come I'd never heard of this movie. It was far better than many of the Iraq war movies coming out as of late.

I caught it on Amazon Prime, very entertaining. Lots of suspense and action, some of it brutal which is what is expected in Afgan.

I'll keep this brief. Watch this!

"War is hell", as the old saying goes, and as long as has been possible, Hollywood has tried to show what war's really like, sometimes succeeding, other times not so. It's probably fair to say that only a select few war pictures really achieve the grittiness and ugly realism of war, and if you know your films, you probably know which ones ("Full Metal Jacket", Apocalypse Now", "Platoon" , etc.

I have seen nearly every film about the Russian Afghan war, mostly Russian and as you can guess, far, far, far from what really happened. Very far, as planet Earth from Venus.

Fantastic and intense movie. U don't need 800 million dollars to make a great movie.

Not bad as far as it goes of course although it's ostensibly about the Russians in Afghanistan, it's "really" about the Israelis and Palestinians the clue is when george Dzundza tells the main character "I fought the Nazis for you!", and gets the reply, "You don't get it, do you Sarge right here, right now, in this country, WE'RE the Nazis!

It's 1981 Afghanistan in the second year of the Russian invasion. Daskal (George Dzundza) commands a Russian tank.

So telling-if the Muhajadeen are fighting the Soviets, they are called "Freedom Fighters" when they fight us-(because we betrayed and abandoned them,) we call them "Terrorists" WE trained them either way This film would never get made today. It has an oddly eerie atmosphere about itOne weird coincidence.