{"id":29123,"date":"2026-01-05T21:07:14","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T21:07:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=29123"},"modified":"2026-01-13T21:55:18","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T21:55:18","slug":"film-der-tiger-the-tank-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=29123","title":{"rendered":"FiLM REViEW: Der Tiger (The Tank), 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Is this Fury<\/em>, only set in a panzer? And on the Eastern rather Western Front? Well, yes and no. Mostly no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The IMDB blurb for the film<\/a> sums up the basics very succinctly: \u2018The five-man crew of a German Tiger tank is sent on a secret mission far behind the fiercely contested front line. Fueled by the Wehrmacht’s methamphetamine, their mission increasingly becomes a journey into the heart of darkness.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u2018yes\u2019 aspects are the stock war movie clich\u00e9s (at least of this era): a bleakly elegiac score; taciturn gruffly spoken men covered in grease, mud and blood; and slightly laboured attempts to confront moral issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The \u2018no\u2019s are more varied: the all German cast are unfamiliar, at least to a non-German audience (and very much as opposed to Fury\u2019<\/em>s star-studded all American roll-call); it also looks like the budget was, by many orders of magnetite, far smaller; this movie also has what hints of what seem at first to be supernatural elements, but which finally resolve as more metaphysical, or even philosophical aspirations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall this film seems to me to suffer from falling between stools, so to speak. Is it a straight ahead WWII action film? Well, mostly\/kind of. Or is it perhaps aspiring to be a German version of Elem Klimov\u2019s awesomely powerful Come And See<\/a><\/em>? Partially, perhaps. And if so, much less successfully or powerfully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Cast and crew.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s certainly of interest in terms of a German made film dealing with WWII and their own Nazi \u2018I was only obeying orders\u2019 history, as well as the nature of war more generally, and war of a type that was particularly virulent on the Ostfront, where two horrifically barbarous empires spent lives in a statistical race to the top coupled with a moral race to the bottom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also quite literally shares a few elements with Come And See<\/em>: the village massacre by fire, and the innocent animal, glimpsed amidst war\u2019s carnage (a deer here, and a strange bird in C&S<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately this was, to me, a bit what I call lustlacquer\u2026 a bit flaccid and off the mark. But it certainly wasn\u2019t utterly shite. Indeed, I kind of enjoyed it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Looking good.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

NB<\/strong> As a panzer-buff, I was impressed with the authentic looking armour. I read, somewhere, that the tank used in this film is a Russian tank – poss a T-55?* – dressed up as a Tiger. If that\u2019s really so, they did a very <\/em>good job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*For another war film centred on a German tank crew that uses a T-55 as a tiger, but without the \u2018make up\u2019, check out Wheels of Terror<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is this Fury, only set in a panzer? And on the Eastern rather Western Front? Well, yes and no. Mostly no. The IMDB blurb for the film sums up the basics very succinctly: \u2018The five-man crew of a German Tiger tank is sent on a secret mission far behind the fiercely contested front line. Fueled … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “FiLM REViEW: Der Tiger (The Tank), 2025”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"FiLM: Der Tiger (The Tank), 2025","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paGwUa-7zJ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29123"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29123"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29187,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29123\/revisions\/29187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}