Released in 1988, a terrible failure in theaters, “The Beast of War” is one of the extremely rare examples of works dealing with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A pure masterpiece, signed by the future director of “Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves”.
1981. Second year of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. A squadron of T-55 battle tanks attacks a village and massacres its inhabitants. On the way back, the crew of one of the tanks led by a tyrannical and paranoid commander gets lost in the Afghan desert. He is then chased by Mujahiddins equipped with an RPG-7 rocket launcher, who do everything possible to avenge the civilians killed during the massacre perpetrated by the Soviet forces…
We too often reduce the filmmaker Kevin Reynolds to the hellish filming that was his Waterworld, which permanently ruined his career, in addition to being angry for a long time with its main star, Kevin Costner. Or even his formidable and full of panache Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, a huge hit in theaters, released in 1991.
Far, very far from the outrageous Manichaeism of Rambo III which was released the same year and which also seriously damaged him, Kevin Reynolds created a pure masterpiece in his second film: The Beast of War.
Here is the trailer…
Looking for a subject for a future film, he discovered a two-act play written by author William Mastrosimone, entitled Nanawatai. A word from the Pashto dialect which means “asylum”; allowing a besieged person to enter the house of any other person, including his enemy, and make a request that cannot be refused, even at the cost of the host’s life or fortune.
An almost metaphysical story about the fascination of war but also the horror it carries, a war film with a western feel in which men are lost and swallowed up in the vastness of the desert, The Beast of War is one of the extremely rare examples of works having as subject/setting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Until then, Hollywood limited itself above all to rehashing the trauma experienced by America and its Vietnam War, the wounds of which have never completely healed.
Sony Pictures
Irrigated by sublime hypnotic music by Mark Isham, the film is largely carried at arm’s length by a cast in unison. Starting with the sensational interpretation of George Dzundza, physically transformed (you have to remember his physique in Voyage au bout de l’enfer to understand), in the guise of the tyrannical tank commander Daskal, a former child of war ultimately himself- even became an authentic executioner. On this, the film has some sequences of crazy brutality and savagery…
Opposite him, Jason Patric finds here quite simply the best role of his career, without forgetting a Steven Bauer who we haven’t seen as good since his Scarface with Brian de Palma, Stephen Baldwin, and Don Harvey aka Private Kaminski, who plays a war madman and will also find a fairly similar character in another film of the genre, Outrages, by Brian de Palma.
Little broadcast on TV, unreleased here on DVD (except obviously in import…), The Beast of War was not released until January 2022 on Blu-ray / DVD. If the film is known to moviegoers, there is still an enormous amount of work to be done to evangelize an overwhelming majority of the public around this masterpiece. If you’ve never seen it before, you know what you have to do.
