This film is extraordinary in the way it manages to take probably one of my favorite horror/thriller tropes, an unresolved mystery with an unexplained ending open to interpretation, and somehow manage to make it boring.
the film starts with a tiny group of apparent mercenaries of british descent in a foresty area, apparently guiding two prisoners in orange jumpsuits and black hoods. They act like they're in imminent danger, and very well may be, but the only instance in which we might see a potential opponent, it is very clearly done in such a way as to make you question whether the enemy is real or a ghost or a figment of their imagination.
after some shenanigans involving them finding a traumatized woman and one of the prisoners being revealed to be a woman and then killed when she tries to escape, most of the mercenary group ends up hiding out NOT in a tank, but in an apparently unarmed Armored Personnel Carrier called a "Bulldog" which has no turret. Thus, the title of the movie "Tank 432" is a lie.
An unusually long time ensues in which they are in the tank, essentially doing nothing but yelling at each other and repeating the blitheringly obvious like "we need to get out", "the door is jammed", "we need to calm down", while nothing happens.
Finally something does happen, as their field medic Karlsson randomly finds a box of documents in the "tank", which just conveniently happen to be personnel files of THEM, listing what "experiments" they have gone under, and listing them all as "Deceased". Their team leader Smith claims to not know what the documents are about, but lets slip that he didn't expect this many casualties. All the while he is writing in a small notebook that he refuses to show the others or tell them what he's writing, and this becomes a point of heated contention all throughout.
One of them also finds a dogtag on the dead pilot of the Bulldog that matches that of one of the soldiers in their company who did not come along into the Bulldog but turned back and went towards the "enemy" after they had to leave one of their wounded behind.
In the tank, one of the soldiers keeps having odd dreams involving them fighting in the tank, scary looking monsters outside the tank, and lots of weird images and noise.
On top of all that, the "tank" is full of vials of an orange powder called "Kratos". The remaining prisoner claims she was a schoolteacher and has no idea why she's a prisoner. The wounded member of their team suddenly shows up, mysteriously not wounded, very angry about being left behind, harassing and taunting them in the tank while inexplicably producing the severed head of the first prisoner who was shot dead earlier.
The guy who had the dreams manages to turn on the tank's engines and drives around in it while the guy outside the tank continues mocking him and urging him to try to run him over. Eventually he does manage to run him over, then the tank drives off, stops, and everyone goes unconscious.
In the tank, the prisoner suddenly produces a flare gun, shoots the Team leader in the face with it, then inexplicably tries to kill Karlsson, who has done nothing but try to help her the entire time. She then shrieks at Karlsson about what is in the "sedatives" she keeps giving everyone, and ends up getting killed by Karlsson anyway. Karlsson discovers she was accidentally shot by the Team leader, and as she dies, grabs his notebook to see he has been writing drug dosage numbers.
As the guy in the tank's controls wakes up, the tank is approached by people in Hazmat suits who then set it on fire, apparently all part of some experiment that is unexplained. Then we go back to the forest we originally started in where a loudspeaker announces that testing will begin, and another soldier emerges from a bunker of some sort.
That was essentially the entire movie. Nothing got explained or resolved. I have no problem with movies that do not explain anything at all and leave this style of completely inexplicable mystery. Somehow, this movie manages to make this mystery completely uninteresting on its own; it was the sort of mystery that needed some extra "What The F***" elements to heighten the mystery, or some extra bit of detail to help ground it. Instead, it flatly avoided any potential sci-fi or supernatural and going with a plain, dull mystery of "super soldier drug testing maybe", trying to hide its mundanity with a false categorization as a Thriller or Horror.
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