The Tank is a World War II movie that was released in limited theaters on September 18, 2025, before landing on Prime Video on January 2, 2026. It has since become one of the most-watched movies on the streaming service and the most-watched Amazon Prime original movie in the United States as of this writing.
And that’s kind of surprising, because The Tank has some features you’d figure might keep viewers away, including the fact that it’s entirely in German with English subtitles. But the movie has managed to break through anyway. What makes it special?
What is The Tank about?
All quiet on the Eastern Front
The German title for this movie is Der Tiger, a reference to the Tiger tank at the center of the story. It’s 1943, and the Germans have been defeated at Stalingrad on the Eastern Front. After retreating, a five-man crew operating a Tiger tank is given a special mission: cross into enemy territory and save a colonel from capture and interrogation by the Red Army.
The movie settles into an episodic structure from there, with the crew encountering obstacle after obstacle on their quest. All of it is beautifully filmed by writer-director Dennis Gansel, who squeezes maximum tension out of every scene. For instance, there’s one sequence where Commander Philip Gerkens (David Schütter) commands his team to drive the tank into a river to avoid a confrontation with Soviet tanks, even though it means the Tiger tank will be completely submerged. That was something that some Tiger tanks could actually do, although the idea of having to seal yourself inside a heavy metal vehicle before diving underwater must have been terrifying. That’s certainly how it comes across in the movie. The gritty realism and attention to detail should please fans of military history.
The longer The Tank goes on, the stranger and bleaker the tone becomes, which is where some of the controversies start.
So a World War II film told from the German perspective, huh?
Then there’s that ending… (no spoilers)
I’ll reiterate that it’s a bit surprising to see a foreign language film do so well in the U.S., we Americans not traditionally being fond of subtitles. That said, more and more people — especially younger people — are growing okay with subtitles, so that cliche may be fading into the background. And with more advanced dubbing options coming along all the time, maybe it’s not surprising at all that a movie like The Tank could find an audience here.
But there are still plenty of controversies to sort through, starting with the fact that The Tank tells its story from the German point of view, which is a literal and figurative minefield. The main characters are drawn with a decent amount of depth and come off as sympathetic, but how sympathetic do you want to make German soldiers during World War II? It’s true that The Tank takes care to show us how the German army committed atrocities during the war, and Commander Gerkens spends time feeling guilty over the acts committed at Stalingrad. It is, in the end, an anti-war film. But many German critics didn’t think this went far enough, that the victims of the German military aren’t given enough focus, and that any attempt to rationalize what the Germans did during this war is too problematic to be worth it.
To put it simply, the protagonists of this anti-war film are Nazis, and that’s going to feel weird no matter how you come at it.
The ending also rubbed some people the wrong way. Without giving away explicit spoilers, there’s a major twist in the final act that re-frames almost everything we’d seen up to that point, and some viewers felt tricked. If you’re the kind of person who likes your movies to be completely straightforward, you may not like it, but if you enjoy films that experiment with form and tone, you may be into it.
The Tank is an unlikely hit on Prime Video
And that’s just the start
I think The Tank treats its subject matter with enough sensitivity and nuance that it can get away with framing the story the way it does. The Tank is about German soldiers during World War II, but it doesn’t endorse what they did. That said, I also understand why people would feel uncomfortable about it anyway.
Despite the excellent craftsmanship, The Tank isn’t an easy film to digest, which is another reason it’s surprising that it’s doing so well. Maybe I’m not giving general audiences enough credit, but I didn’t think they’d embrace something so knotty and tricky quite so enthusiastically. On balance, I think its success is a good thing.
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Meanwhile, on Prime Video
If you enjoyed The Tank, you may be in the mood for other offbeat offerings on Prime Video. The Vast of Night is a deeply underrated sci-fi film that takes place in the 1950s, in the shadow of World War II. If you want to stick closer to the actual conflict, The Man in High Castle is a great original series that takes place in an alternate world where the Allies lost. And then there are Prime Video tentpole shows like The Boys, a politically superhero drama that returns for its fifth and final season in April.
All of these shows and movies are pretty intense and deal frankly with touchy subject matter, so maybe it’s not a surprise that The Tank was a hit on Prime Video.
- Release Date
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September 18, 2025
- Runtime
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117 Minutes
- Director
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Dennis Gansel
