Fury

“War is hell”, my father would tell me when I was a boy, was not just a catch phrase, but the gospel truth. "There is little glory in it," he would teach, "it’s mostly just pain and death." He'd know about war I figured, having fought in two of them - he wore a long panel of ribbons on his chest when he went to work each morning and those ribbons matched the heavy medals I would dig out of the bottom of the cedar chest sometimes... stars and crosses and eagles. Yeah, he'd know I figured, and so I believed him.  And having viewed Fury’s trailers, I was prepared to be reminded of that truth when I bought the ticket. But Fury director David Ayer isn’t content with just a reminder of what I already thought that I knew; he is committed, in Fury, to drag us up and down and through the devil's hot house - and then back and forth across it again and again until that message becomes like a mantra given forth in repeated and graphic displays of physical, mental and spiritual pain - pounding over and over again until we’ve learned the lesson.

Fury is an examination of the depth and height of human behavior in war, set during the last month of the European Theater of WWII (April 1945). The allies are making a final surge through Germany - the outcome of the war is certain. And yet Germany is commanded by its fuehrer to fight on, including now it's women and children, in defense of the motherland - an order gruesomely enforced by the dreaded SS. A battle-weary tank crew commanded by U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt) is slugging it out against a sporadic but still deadly defense. The veteran team in the M4A3E8 Sherman tank, named Fury, has been together from North Africa, through Normandy, to here. The crew has lost its bow gunner - dead in the tank as it pulls into a rendezvous base. There, the gunner is replaced by Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters). Norman’s never been inside of a tank, never seen combat, and is a subtraction not an addition to the tightly bonded Fury team - “I promised my crew a long time ago I'd keep them alive… you’re standing in the way of that.” Collier tells the petrified private.

It takes a while for Ayer to get to the payoff part of the film - the desperate situation of the crew’s disabled tank in the path of an advancing enemy force. The first half of the film is spent getting to know Fury’s crew. They’ve lived through several hells and it’s taken its toll on each of them. Ayer’s soldiers, all those appearing on the screen it seems, are not only physically scarred but mentally damaged. They are hard and vulgar, their feel for human life muffled – there is no benevolence in Ayer’s war. The crew's humanity has been stripped away leaving little else but loyalty to themselves – even to Norman eventually. Pitt shines here, amidst the artillery, the fire and smoke, as the scarred patriarch of these men. But a surprisingly brighter glow comes from Shia Lebeouf as Boyd "Bible" Swan, the only “believer” in the crew until Norman comes along. His character is more interesting than Pitt’s and the more believably played up against the over the top atrocities of Collier and the debauchery of Grady "Coon-Ass" Travis (Jon Bernthal, The Walking Dead), the tanks loader – Lebeouf nails it.

The detail in Fury is exceptional, from the uniforms to the armament (real Shermans and the only working German Tiger Tank on the planet). But for a film with such attention to detail and with so much care taken to obtain realism, I was disappointed that Fury’s long battle finale was an artificial device – an unreal encounter. The contrivance provides the opportunity for a glorious (oddly) end story and some deep ( I suppose) visual symbolism, but it seems suddenly out of place and severely weakens the film. Fury is grey and grim. It is tense, at least in its second half. It is uncomfortable, disturbing and often wrenching. But, by the end, the film is less significant than these attributes would lead to believe. Unfortunately, Fury's whole is somehow less than the sum of it's parts. And yet… still a 7 out of 10.