YMMV / T-34

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • Nightvision equipment in World War II? Very real, available technology that had been in deep consideration from both sides for military purposes.
  • Inmates running in circles in boots to see how badly their feet will bleed afterwards, and how much the boots wear out. A real precedent and practice.
  • Nikolay's ambush that saw him destroy a whole regiment of Germans with far fewer forces is based on a real battle led by Ivan Lyubushkin.
• Base-Breaking Character: While the film was funded by the Russian government and was a critical success, some Russians were not happy with the Noble Demon depiction of Klaus Jaeger and accused the film of whitewashing Nazi atrocities. Popular Russian internet reviewer BadComedian for instance, accused the film of being "pro-Nazi" and argued that the film downplayed the atrocious conditions of Nazi POW camps in the Eastern Front. He also argued that Klaus's character was made Unintentionally Sympathetic due to the better chemistry between him and Nikolay, than Nikolay is with Anya.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The film received a huge chunk of its funding directly from the Russian government; it's therefore difficult not to see the film's extremely obvious appeal to Patriotic Fervor as a deliberate effort by that government to generate popular support for Vladimir Putin. It was also criticized by left-leaning Russian critics for being a "pro-war" film, which sanitized the horrors of war and reduced battles into video game-like spectacles. In particular, the war is depicted through Black-and-White Morality and the villains are Obviously Evil yet ineffective, which necessitates their total defeat, as if it is romanticizing the war and calling for a repeat. Fast forward to 2022, when Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine under the guise of "de-Nazification"...
• Spiritual Successor: To the 1965 Soviet film The Lark, also about a group of Soviet prisoners of war escaping from German-held territory in a T-34, only replacing the former's Bittersweet Ending and anti-war sentiments with Patriotic Fervor.