This is one of 10 war movies you must see in your lifetime: 36 years after its release, it remains the absolute pinnacle of the genre.

1981 The second year of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. A squadron of T-55 battle tanks attack the village and massacre 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 mujahideen armed with RPG-7 rocket launchers, who are doing everything they can to avenge the civilian deaths inflicted on them by the Soviet forces…

We often belittle filmmaker Kevin Reynolds for the infernal filming that was his Aquatic World that ruined his career forever, in addition to being angry at its lead star Kevin Costner for a long time. Or even his excellent and full of panache Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, a huge hit in cinemas, released in 1991.

A far, far cry from the outrageous Manichaeism of Rambo III, which came out the same year and which also seriously damaged it, Kevin Reynolds has created a pure masterpiece in his second film: Beast of War.

Here’s the trailer…

Looking for a subject for an upcoming film, he discovered a two-act play written by author William Mastrosimon called Nanavatai. A word from the Pashto dialect meaning “shelter”; Allows the besieged to enter any other person’s house, including his enemy, and make demands that cannot be denied, even at the cost of the host’s life and wealth.

An almost metaphysical story about the glamor of war but also its horror, a war film with a Western feel in which people are lost and swallowed up in the vastness of the desert, A beast of war This is one of the extremely rare examples of Soviet invasion of Afghanistan subject/embedded works. Before that, Hollywood was primarily limited to rehashing the trauma experienced by America and its Vietnam War, the wounds of which have never fully healed.

Buoyed by Mark Isham’s soaring hypnotic score, the film is largely carried at arm’s length by the cast. Starting with Giorgi Dzundza’s sensational interpretation, physically transformed (remember his physique in Voyage au bout de l’enfer), the tyrant in the guise of the tank commander Daskal, a former son of war, eventually became himself. A real butcher. On top of that, the film has some sequences of insane brutality and savagery…

Opposite him, Jason Patrick turns in quite simply the best role of his career here, not forgetting Stephen Bauer, who we haven’t seen this good since his scarred face with Brian De Palma, Stephen Baldwin and Don Harvey, as well as Private Kaminsky. we have seen war madman and will also find a very similar character in Brian De Palma’s other genre film, Outrages.

Little broadcast on TV, unreleased here on DVD (except obviously imports…), A beast of war Not out on Blu-ray / DVD until January 2022. If the film is familiar to moviegoers, there is still a huge amount of work to be done to evangelize the vast majority of the public around this masterpiece. If you’ve never seen it before, you know what to do.