Fridge Horror
- The first scene. Just a rural Afghan village, living contentedly one morning like it had for probably centuries, doing no one harm. Then the Soviet Air Force shows up, followed shortly by Soviet armor. Wipes it off the map in under five minutes and is literally crushing the survivors less than five minutes after that.
- The implications of this first scene, the rest of the film, and our Harsher in Hindsight context from the 2020s. As of the setting of 1981, it's a pointless massacre being repeated countless times in a pointless invasion. What they couldn't know, even in 1988, is that it eventually helped to break the back of a superpower and bled everyone dry to no purpose. The Taliban would flow into the power vacuum the Soviet-backed government left behind, only to give aid to a certain Saudi that would get them invaded by the other superpower (then the world's only hyperpower) in 2001. While the Americans wouldn't go around poisoning water supplies, it'd be another twenty years of pointless anarchic fighting to no useful end since the Taliban just flowed back into the vacuum the American-backed government left behind. All the surviving Afghan characters in this film? That's what they have to look forward to for the next thirty years after the closing credits.
Fridge Brilliance
- This may as well have been called Self-Sabotage: the Motion Picture. Everything that turned the film from a simple revenge story to a voyage of the damned in a tank was completely self-inflicted, starting with the assault on the village to begin with: tanks are not good in anything approximating close terrain as proved when some farmers with Molotovs took out a background tank and T5447's radio.
- Daskal's interrogation methods put Taj in charge and essentially force him onto a Roaring Rampage of Revenge for honor. As well as the women, who end up being the bigger threat.
- Daskal mistrusts Samad since he's Afghani and therefore interprets his burnt map his way. The wrong way.
- Daskal's on the top of his tank and clearly knows more than the driver, so when Koverchenko questions turning right he doubles-down on turning right. Into the pass with no escape.
- Committing war crimes (at best) and crimes against humanity (at worst) like poisoning wells and booby-trapping discarded items may have been Soviet doctrine at the time. Too bad it ends up poisoning the helo crew that could've airlifted them out and giving Koverchenko a means of escape.
- Daskal finally has enough of Koverchenko's rule-abiding insubordination and has him literally crucified on a rock. So of course when Taj comes across him, the two can bond over what really unites them: revenge.
- Daskal forcing T5447 past her limits causes her to progressively break down. This lets everyone chasing her track her down that much easier.
- The Afghans don't get off too much better on this front.
- Taj's uncle and mentor is wounded early on with a flesh wound to the calf; he shrugs it off as a scratch and limps along with chasing the tank. The limp gets progressively worse and he never really stops bleeding. The last we see of him, he's set down next to a lone scrub-tree in the desert with the promise that they'll come back for him. Everyone knows that's a long shot and for all the good it did he probably should've rested off the wound.
- The women, being the most numerous direct survivors of the Soviet attack, are absolutely adamant on revenge. The men won't let them have any and constantly refuse their help, meaning they have to go off on their own Roaring Rampage of Revenge. They get frustrated when stopped from stoning Koverchenko to death, go and rig the pass to collapse by themselves with scavenged Soviet plastic explosives and grenades, then brutally murder Daskal offscreen. This causes Taj no small consternation later.
- Their entire honor code, really, serves as this. They're forced by this code to get revenge by chasing on foot a tank over dozens of kilometers, lose three more of their own in the process, then absolutely must give sanctuary when asked, all for it to eventually not matter at all in the end.
- The film has three major themes: revenge, forgiveness, and the balance between the two. This is most easily seen in the relationship between Taj and Koverchenko, who are both idealists in their own right.
- Taj is a young man raised in an honor culture where forgiveness explicitly trumps revenge, per Samad's description of Pashtunwali. He follows this to the letter, even when it hurts and he's obviously conflicted. When it comes down to revenge and forgiveness, he errs towards forgiveness.
- Koverchenko has been fighting the mujahedeen for two years and the Soviet system for longer. He's been busted down from a brainy army intel job to tank driver, where he's almost literally just a cog in a machine that makes it go, all for "insubordination". He is still, despite this, an idealist, albeit a bitter one. This bitterness, and the crimes he's compelled (if not forced) to commit, powers his need for revenge—always pointed upwards or to the sides, never toward the "actual" enemy. When given a choice between revenge and forgiveness at the end, he chooses what looks like forgiveness... except that it is simply deeper revenge. "I want you to live to see them lose." The only person he actually wants to save is Golikov, and even that's reluctantly.
- Revenge is what brings the two together. Revenge is what they bond over.
- Because of this, the end, as it comes, is inevitable. The women kill Daskal, thus rendering Koverchenko's vengeful mercy irrelevant and making him the only real survivor—at least, with any authority—so he can go home without Daskal trying to have him court-martialed. He was completely ready to go with the mujahedeen, even with the language barrier, but once the path home opened up, he took it, because for him survival was paramount and with his revenge, he no longer has any common motivation with Taj. He cynically takes advantage of Taj's mercy, he knows it, and he hates himself for it. Taj, meanwhile, sees what he thought was his new friend fly off into the Soviet sunset yet still spares him.
