Journal of American Studies of Turkey

13 (2001): 87-88

Film Review

Kevin Reynolds: The Beast (1988)

Ann Fey

The Beast is an American production by Columbia Pictures filmed in Israel. It is a strikingly disturbing war film with an anti-war theme, an open-ended morality play, a heroic tale whose characters range from saints to sadists. Set in Afghanistan in 1981, the second year of the Russian invasion, it is relevant and powerful today, rife with contemporary issues.

Its action is based on the traditional war genre plot: it focuses on a small group of men separated from the army at large, a microcosmic reflection of the larger force. The action centers on a Russian tank and crew heading for Kandahar who take a wrong turn and are lost in the desert. The incidents are war-specific but some elements of the content, production, and presentation of the film seem global in their relevance to other conflicts in these times of desert wars. Around the time of its release American presence in Afghanistan had supplanted the Russian.

Photographically powerful images of horrible explosions, amber dust clouds, fleeting shots of masked alien-like invaders storming and burning villages and poisoning wells, scenes of torture and killing, splash violently across the scene, masterfully timed and lit, artistically controlled and terrible. The structure of the film intersperses these action scenes with calm, quiet exchanges and dialogues, which take place within two different groups: local Afghans and the Russian tank crew.

Among the Afghans, the interactions involve older respected traditional tribal leaders, a Mujahedeen motorcycle riding militant named Mustapha, and the new moderate and idealistic heir to leadership, Taj. As Taj more clearly questions his worthiness to take on his inherited position as Khan, he grows to be more worthy of it. Sherina, the woman in these dunes, leads her sisters with cleverness and emotion. Her movements are tangential to the men, central to the action.

In the tank the Russian crew includes impressionable semi-reluctant but obedient youngster types; a committed, thoughtful moderate Koverchenko whose spectacles (that formulaic costume indicator in both literature and film) underscore his role as rational seeker-of-the-right; and Shazaman, a moderate, religious, idealistic Afghan who is committed to an informed and peacefully unified future world culture.

This crew is headed by a madman, Daskal, a war-mongering beast, inseparable in nature from his secure destroyer tank. This powerful despot unleashes his evil, as he murders Shazaman and leaves the reasonable Koverchenko bound in the desert to die. When Koverchenko is approached by the enemy Afghan group, and Taj is about to kill him, he demands they give him "nanawatal," sanctuary, the Muslim obligation to all who request it. He has come to learn of this obligation from his murdered Muslim cohort. Several scenes - sensitive, interesting - establish a growing trust between Taj and Koverchenko. The action shifts as they join in in pursuit on foot of Daskal and the wayward tank. High angle shots as the tank crawls along in the desert, close-ups of the churning tracks, traveling shots of the turret seem to personify the beastly tank. Some moments inside recall the psychologically striking atmosphere achieved in Das Boot (Wolfgang Petersen 1981).

The film uses some war genre formulae, and some now-familiar images: a soldier straddling the tank's gun like the pilot astride the atomic bomb in the ending of Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick 1964); Koverchenko seen from above suffering in the desert with arms akimbo pinned down like a Christ-figure, and later flying through the air on the end of a helicopter rescue line like a Peter Pan. The madness of the leader Daskal is traditional, more irrational than Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny (Edward Dmytryk 1954) , madder and more dangerous than Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979). It is almost amusing to think that this sand-epic action film originated as a stage play by William Mastrosimone. But so did the spectacular Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962) first appear in Robert Bolt's stage play. Elements in the production blur the historical specificity of the film and make it play for today, an eerie reflection of current news footage from the Middle East. Devoid of architectural indicators, the desert setting becomes generic. The Russian roles take on American identity, as indeed the military roles in that country made the same shift. The Russians are played in this American production by American actors using American accented English. (The Afghan characters' Pashtu words are subtitled, in roles played effectively by American actors who learned their dialogue phonetically.) The role of the despotic Daskal is played by George Dzundza, a familiar American actor well known for his role as a police detective early in the television series Law and Order.

Filmed on location in Israel The Beast had a brief theatrical release. It was presented in 1988 at the New York and the Toronto Film Festival, was honored at the Cleveland International Film Festival in 1989, and was shortly thereafter withdrawn from distribution. American involvement in Afghanistan at that time may have been relevant. The 2001 release of the digital video has spurred increased interest in the film in the United States.