Fury is a 2014 war film directed by David Ayer and starring Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena and Shia LeBeouf.
The violence in Fury makes Saving Private Ryan look like a doddy old Aunt’s home movies. It’s frequent and it’s brutal. In the opening minute or two we witness a guy being repeatedly stabbed in the face. Repeatedly. In the face. And it just gets worse. People are shot, stabbed, beaten, burned and blown to pieces regularly throughout the film. The American GI’s in Fury are not a Band of Brothers. The film is set during the closing days of the war, as the American forces are closing in on Berlin. The American troops here are battle-weary, dirty, shell-shocked and angry. They don’t want medals or promotions. They just want the Germans to hurry up and surrender so everyone can go home.
The fanaticism that existed in Nazi Germany has always fascinated and horrified me. None more so than what existed as the Third Reich was in its death throes. In Fury we see this madness all around – children in army uniforms, ‘traitors’ hung from telegraph poles, Waffen SS troops fighting to their last breaths even as they are run over by advancing American tanks.
Fury employs some war movie clichés and stereotypes, but it does it so well I didn’t mind too much. It’s sort of like director David Ayer wanted to make the classic war movie he grew up watching, but an updated version, a more accurate version. A version that lets you know what it really looks like when a decomposing body gets minced under the treads of a tank. It’s pretty fucking ugly.
Anyway, in Fury we have the battle-hardened Sergeant (Pitt), the religious guy (Shia LeBoeuf), and the ‘new guy’, (Logan Lerman). One of the film’s more disturbing scenes is early on. As his initiation, the guys make the new guy clean the inside of the tank. He basically has to scrub the remains of the guy he’s replacing off the seat he will be occupying. As he scrubs the blood away he comes across the remains of the guy’s face, which has sort of been peeled off like a mask. It’s a fairly horrific image.
The story revolves around Pitt’s tank crew as they set out on missions to secure a couple of towns and crossroads. Since that is what pretty much every World War II movie is about, Ayer wisely focuses on the action and the characters rather than the details of their mission. He also wisely doesn’t go for the ‘big battle’, there’s no heroic charge towards enemy lines or massive tank battles that get confusing and lost in spectacle. The action all revolves around their tank (which they’ve named Fury).
The film reminded me a little of The Hurt Locker, in that it is basically made up of several set pieces, with a few connecting scenes in between. The first is a fantastic tank battle that pits Fury and three other American tanks against some German ground troops with anti-tank guns. It’s clear early on that Pitt’s crew know what they’re doing. It’s all by the book, and brutally efficient. They spot the enemy, zero in, and fire. Rinse, repeat, and advance.
My favourite of these set pieces is one that sees Fury set out with the other three tanks again, but this time instead of ground troops they encounter a far superior German ‘Tiger’ tank. At the beginning of the film we’re told that the German tanks were much better armed and armoured than the American tanks. This is made very clear when the Tiger makes short work of the other three tanks and their crews, leaving Fury all alone. What I love about this scene is that it comes down to the skill of the tank crews rather than the machinery. Pitt’s character masterfully uses the American tank’s superior speed to manoeuvre around behind the Tiger and attack its weak spot at the rear. I can’t do the suspense of the scene justice. I was literally gripping the arm rests.
As brilliant as the battle scenes are, the stuff that connects them is the where the film starts to falter. There’s a scene in a house in a ruined town where Pitt and the new guy meet two German women. The new guy shows his sensitive side by playing the piano and then gets laid. The scene is played out like tough-as-nails Pitt is going to rape one of the women, but of course he doesn’t, he instead gives her food and cigarettes and they share a meal together. The scene is not bad, it just rings false. Plus, it’s woefully predictable. The new guy befriends the German girl and promises to write to her, so of course she’s going to die. And sure enough, no sooner do all the American guys get safely out of the building, it gets shelled and she dies.
And I can’t bring myself to like Shia LeBeouf. His acting range is extremely limited. In this film he spends half his screen time crying. He seems to permanently have a tear rolling down his muddy cheek. Seriously, I’ve never seen someone cry so much in a war film. It gets really irritating. It’s like he figured that because he was in a war film he needed his lines to be heartfelt, so he says them all while teary-eyed. He's about as deep as a fucking contact lens.
And in his earlier film Harsh Times, which was also about the dehumanising effect of exposure to wartime violence, David Ayer at least gave the main character some motivation. We saw how his experiences in the Gulf War shaped his behaviour throughout the film. Fury doesn’t have that, so when we see Brad Pitt make the decision to stay and fight against impossible odds rather than abandon his tank, we have absolutely no idea why. It makes the final ‘Custer’s last stand’ scene a bit ridiculous. They could have abandoned their crippled tank and made it back to the American lines, regrouped, and lived to fight another day. Instead we get a silly scene where they all heroically band together behind their Sergeant and decide to fight to the death.
This scene is even more puzzling because earlier in the film Pitt tells new guy that he made a promise to his men when they first met – that he would get them through the war alive. And that he failed in that promise when the gunner that new guy replaces ended up dying. What the? Is he just so intent on not doing things by halves that he figures now he’ll just make sure the rest of them die too?
I couldn’t help but feel with this scene that maybe Ayer was making a statement about the fanaticism on the German side by having the Americans show the same sort of nihilism.
Maybe. But it turns what is a brutally realistic war film into a sort of 300 Spartans against the Persian army stand off. It even has a vertical camera pull back showing the smouldering tank surrounded by dead Germans, an almost identical shot to the closing shot of Zack Snyder’s 300.
And as well filmed as the scene is, it stretches belief far too much. So many times in war films we see a tank taken out by a guy simply dropping a grenade through the hatch. I struggled to believe an entire battalion of Waffen SS troops wouldn’t have thought of doing that to an immobilised tank. A couple of guys actually do open the hatch, but all they do is peer inside and wait to be shot in the face. Plus, when we see the German troops advancing, Ayer makes the point of showing half of them carrying anti-tank rockets. Yet during the prolonged shoot out that follows, these weapons are mysteriously nowhere to be seen.
Another thing bothered me. New guy’s character (his name in the film is Norman). Norman starts out as the wet-behind-the-ears recruit who deplores violence. By the end, he’s happily machine gunning Nazis left right and centre, at one point even declaring that he’s started to enjoy it. I understand this is supposed to be some kind of comment about him becoming desensitized yadda yadda, but I just didn’t buy it. I would have preferred something less predictable.
I mentioned before that Ayer seems inspired by war films he’s seen. I think that is ultimately what keeps this film from being great. It seems to chop between being a visceral look at war time violence, (ala Saving Private Ryan), a dense character study on the mental trauma of war (ala The Thin Red Line) and a gung ho macho war flick (ala pretty much any pre-Platoon war film). Oddly though, it reminded me a lot of the Sam Fuller war film The Big Red One, albeit with slightly less likeable characters.
Small gripes aside, Fury is an excellent film. Brad Pitt is superb in it. He's matured into a far better actor than I ever thought he would become. The production design is beyond good. It's awesome. Saving Private Ryan may have set the bar for realism, but Fury leaps right over it. Everything about the film works.
It goes without saying that real WWII veteran Fuller did it better (no scene in Fury has the emotional impact of Lee Marvin carrying the dying girl around on his shoulders), but David Ayer has made a gritty wartime drama that has some of the best action scenes ever committed to film. This is just over two hours very well spent.
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