Movie Review : ‘Beast’ Storms Through Moral Issues of War

The coward often believes that war ennobles. The brave man may be just as convinced that war corrupts. In “The Beast” (citywide), nobility and corruption embark on an inexorable chase and wind up--not necessarily intentionally--locked in a bloody embrace.

This adventure film about the Afghan-Soviet war, by William Mastrosimone based on his play “Nanawatai,” is obvious and preachy. But it’s also a murderously efficient, brutally effective piece of work, an action film that establishes its own grinding, merciless rhythm. It keeps whipping you up, driving relentlessly toward its finish--like the Soviet tank, “The Beast,” which is its main visual symbol.

The movie--shot by a young director, Kevin Reynolds, who has an amazing eye and a flair for tension and spectacle--casts all its moral issues in a rigid, unbending framework. On one side is the paranoid Soviet tank commander, Daskal (George Dzundza), who won his army spurs at 8 in World War II Stalingrad, dropping grenades down enemy tanks. On the other side are the rebels--holy warriors flinging themselves into battle, some convinced they are Allah’s instrument, “a stone in his sling.”

Mastrosimone casts the story in the form of a morality play: a struggle over the conscience of the humane Soviet tank driver, Koverchenko (Jason Patric), pulled on one side by his sense of duty and, on the other, by the rebels and their leader Taj (Steven Bauer). But the struggle is basically a sham. As in Mastrosimone’s quasi-feminist rape play “Extremities,” all the moral questions are solved in advance.

In the beginning, the Soviet tank crew enters a small Afghan desert village and sets it afire. When one villager proves defiant, they run a tank over his body, crushing him. It’s Koverchenko who drives the tank, under Daskal’s orders. And the crushed victim, rotting in the sun, is Taj’s brother. So the war is presented as Victor Hugo’s French Revolution in “ ‘93”: a vast magnification of a single, highly personal struggle between godlike individuals who embody moral absolutes.

Daskal is evil incarnate, a crazed killer, a Capt. Bligh of the sands, who kills his Afghan navigator out of paranoia. There’s only one question: When will Koverchenko make up his mind and blow this maniac away?

Reynolds, whose crew gives the film a grandiose grittiness, lists David Lean as his main inspiration here--but the plot reminds you of “Sahara” in reverse.

The actors--especially Dzundza, Patric and Don Harvey as the drunken tank gunner, Kaminski--reek of sweat, exertion, enervating effort. And Reynolds and cameraman Douglas Milsome (“Full Metal Jacket”) fill the screen with scorching desert vistas, overpowering landscapes shot in Israel, where the humans struggle punily back and forth beneath high mountains and on deadly plateaus, with occasional chasms yawning under their feet.

There’s a strange dividend from the fact that, in the movie, the Afghans speak Pushtu, the native dialect, while the Soviets speak slang English: immediate parallels between the Afghan and Vietnam wars. The jazz score by Mark Isham (“Trouble in Mind”) may remind you that Philip Glass scored “Hamburger Hill”--and give you pause about the convictions of the musical avant-garde.

Reynolds’ first movie, “Fandango”--a seriocomic reminiscence on five University of Texas schoolmates who embark on a pre-graduation spree during the Vietnam War--may be one of the more underrated American films of the ‘80s. It was originally produced by Steven Spielberg, who apparently disliked its dark tone. But it’s Reynolds’ pessimism that made the comedy interesting, just as the occasional dark irony of “The Beast” makes it more intense than the Stallone-Norris America-First battle sagas which it superficially resembles.

“The Beast” (MPAA-rated R, for violence and language) is no anti-war movie, but it isn’t a jingoistic blood bath either. It’s a battle movie alert in some ways to war’s stupidity, to the cycle of waste and futility it represents, the destructive happenstance and fumbling bloodiness it usually generates--and the howls of the beast as it kills or dies.