YMMV / T-34

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • Nightvison equipment in World War II? Very real, available technology that had been in deep consideration from both sides for military purposes.
  • Inmates running in circles in boots to see how badly their feet will bleed afterwards, and how much the boots wear out. A real precedent and practice.
  • Nikolay's ambush that saw him destroy a whole regiment of Germans with far fewer forces is based on a real battle led by Ivan Lyubushkin.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The film received a huge chunk of its funding directly from the Russian government; it's therefore difficult not to see the film's extremely obvious appeal to Patriotic Fervor as a deliberate effort by that government to generate popular support for the ongoing war with Ukraine. The thematic similarity between the film's plot and the government's own propaganda about Ukraine is glaring:
  • The crew of the original T-34, after heroically fighting back against the Germans invading their country, are captured and taken behind enemy lines, where they stage an escape and "smash the Nazi vermin in his own lair."
  • Russia's official line as its reason for annexing the Crimea in 2014 and launching its full-scale invasion in 2022 is that Ukraine's inhabitants are either ethnic Russians or Russophilic Ukrainians seeking liberation from a corrupt, fascist government.