‘Battle for Afghanistan’ Looks Like a Soviet ‘Saving Private Ryan’

We’re not the only nation with a military that got bogged down in Afghanistan. The Russian movie “Battle for Afghanistan” takes place during the final days of the USSR’s 1980s campaign in the country.

The movie is set to open on Aug. 13 in theaters and via video on demand. We’ve got a first look at the trailer.

Soviet pilot Alexander Vasiliev crashes his plane and is captured by the Mujahideen as the USSR’s military is withdrawing from the country. Alexander’s dad is a Soviet general, so the 108th Motor Rifle Division is tasked with rescuing the pilot and bringing him home.

That sounds like another movie based on true events. Of course, “Saving Private Ryan” was about retrieving a regular Joe paratrooper whose only three brothers had already been killed in combat. “Battle for Afghanistan” is about risking the lives of troops to protect the son of a high-ranking Soviet official. Don’t let anyone tell you there’s not a difference between superpowers.

Even though the story is based on true events from the conflict, director Pavel Lungin’s movie generated controversy when it was released in Russia in 2019. While the film aims to show the hardships faced by the men sent on the rescue mission, Soviet politicians and some veterans accused the director of being “anti-patriotic” for showing the realities of war.

Lungin is well-respected in the international film community. He won the Best Director Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990 for his debut film “Taxi Blues,” and his later work has been shown at festivals around the world. That acclaim has included “Battle for Afghanistan,” as Pavel and his son Alexander shared the Golden Goblet Award for Best Screenplay at the 2019 Shanghai International Film Festival.

The director is hardly an anti-government activist in his home country. In 2014, he publicly supported Vladimir Putin’s military intervention in Ukraine and Crimea, a policy that earned near-universal condemnation from other nations around the world.

Maybe part of the problem back home is that the Russian title of the movie translates as “Leaving Afghanistan.” If your government claims that your country never has lost a war, that sounds like a defeatist title.

Here in the States, we’ll get a non-spoiler title with “Battle for Afghanistan” and a chance to see a real Russian war movie about a conflict we really should have studied before we invaded the same country in 2001.

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