I watched it straight off. (Mine had English subtitles; where did you get your copy?)
I thought it was fairly good as a story. And very good as a primer for tank combat. The scenes filmed inside the Russian T-34 were very compelling; dank, dirty, dingy, cramped, and so on. They must have had a consultant on the film with experience driving (or wrestling, really) a Russian tank. Seeing that poor actor having to pull, yank, shove, crank, and jerk the gear shift and the steering laterals brings to mind a comment by a tank expert: "You really need to be built like a gorilla to drive a Russian tank."
The story itself was a little odd. The style wavered between a gritty realism, and a Werner Herzog-style surrealism. Eventually, the German Tiger tank just sort of disappeared into thin air, without explanation. Just as the heroic Russian tank crewman did at the end. Making me wonder if both weren't simply figments of the Russian major's imagination. (His mind unhinged by the horror of war, maybe?)
And then the movie departed from the main narrative entirely for about 20 minutes to cover the surrender of the Germans in Berlin. It was almost like a scene from a different movie.
Still, very interesting. Great look at massed formations of T-34's in battle.
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