For Christmas I got my brother the DVD of the 1932 movie Freaks (a classic and a must-see), and while I was in my local brick-and-mortar media store doing so the film Tank 432 caught my eye. Ooh, Ben Wheatley's name is prominently displayed on the cover, and I like Ben Wheatley's stuff! It's also British and independent and I always like to support that! So I bought a copy with the intention of watching it somewhere down the line. Then a couple of weeks ago I happened to lend it to my brother, still without having watched it.
I am so very, very sorry.
A group of soldiers, apparently mercenaries, are on a mission in the countryside. We don't know much about this mission except that it involves transporting two hostages in orange jumpsuits and hoods somewhere. They come across an abandoned farmhouse with a barn full of the headless bodies of another squad, and a hysterical girl hiding in a storage container and drawing endless pictures of a strange figure. They're also being chased by someone or something (possibly the real life version of whatever the hysterical girl was drawing) and after fleeing the farmhouse - leaving two of their men behind because of injury or mental breakdown - they come across an abandoned armoured vehicle in a field that they take refuge in. Now trapped inside the APV and with their mysterious enemy still outside waiting for them, the soldiers have to face threats inside as well as out...
"You don't understand!" the CO of the trapped group screams at another character at one point, and he might as well have been talking to the audience for all the sense this film makes. The best I could make out after watching it was that (and beyond this point lie SPOILERS; proceed at your own risk) someone was conducting tests with some kind of combat drug called Kratos (it was either a combat drug or several jars of turmeric) that apparently gave its users/test subjects hallucinations, seizures or just sent them barking mad. So they just dosed their test subjects up, gave them live rounds and set them loose to see what would happen. I can only imagine the experiment brief for this - "Hypothesis: test subjects will all go stark raving mad by the experiment and probably kill each other." "Observed results: yup."
I mean, I think I get what first-time director Nick Gillespie (Ben Wheatley turned out to be just the executive producer) was going for with Tank 432 - claustrophobia, fear of the unknown, not being able to trust your own eyes/mind/those around you - it's just that these ideas weren't exactly put across very well at all. Even the scenes inside the APV don't make it feel like the characters are trapped in too-close quarters, low on food, water and fresh air. We're never given any background as to what is going on on, or what the soldiers think is going on, or even why we should care; and while some might argue that's left open to fit in with the confused, otherworldly/hallucinogenic themes, it works terribly for the audience because we're given so very little story-wise to hook us in. What's the meaning of the dead squad they find? Are the prisoners they're transporting terrorists (the orange jumpsuits and hoods seem to denote them as such) and what did they do? Why are they fighting and running from? Who left that APV in the middle of a field for apparently months but stocked it with recent files? None of these questions will be answered during the course of the film, even after the ending revelations, so feel free to make up your own answers if it makes you feel any better.
Most of the characters are pretty one-dimensional as well. There's a rookie soldier, a female medic, a screaming girl, a mostly-silent prisoner who only speaks to give a couple of pieces of exposition, a wounded man, the CO who just yells at everyone to be quiet and makes notes in a little black book, and Gantz, whose purpose in this film is to swear, fight people, and at the film's nadir, take a crap while trying to fix the APV. Which we get to see in a loving close-up (and which no-one else in the APV ever notices despite their cramped quarters). I don't know about you, but I really could have lived without that bit. Pretty much none of these characters are particularly endearing to the audience either, and so we're left with just the plot to try to keep our interest (see above for how well that turns out).
Nick Gillespie worked as a camera operator on several of Ben Wheatley's films before writing and directing Tank 432, and I will say this for the film - there's some very pretty cinematography in it. Time lapse shots of the sky and of flowers opening and closing; close-ups of insects and shots of the APV from a distance to highlight the isolation of it all. But good cinematography cannot be the only thing holding a film together, especially when it's as abstract as this. The average viewer will be turned off by the confusing, choose-your-own-explanation nature of the film and the blandness or unpleasantness of the characters, and likely just left frustrated by the end of it. Hopefully Gillespie will learn from his first film and improve his skills, and we'll see more, better films from him down the line. And hopefully they'll explain more of the plot and not show us someone having a crap in them.
(Oh, and the APV is not a tank.)
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