An intensely bleak and frank look at five soldiers lives within the confines of a tank at the final moments of World War Two, Fury doesn’t pull its punches and proves to be one solid war movie.
Brad Pitt heads the story as tank “Fury’s” captain Don Collier during the conclusion of World War 2 and the allied forces merciless push deep into enemy territory in Germany. With the enemy more fraught and zealous than ever, Allied forces are being cut down in what is an exhausted, pointless phase of the war. His tank crew are one of the few survivors on the spearhead.
The film begins with one of their five man crew killed in action and a greenhorn rookie is recruited in to take his place. This recruit is little more than a typist, played by a fresh-faced Logan Lerman, and given the task of co-driver, so you can see immediately where our character development comes from. Lerman’s character Norman is the audience surrogate and introduces us to not only the bleak reality around him but also how aggressively inhuman his crewmates have become over the months of war.
The acting here is superb. Director David Ayer apparently drove his actors hard here and you can see it. Pitt’s recent career has been debatable but he is great here! Transformers star Shia LeBeouf is playing a very downplayed character role here, which is also impressive; he works well as one of the tank crew veterans.
The action and tank battles are also excellent; the film works in plenty of quiet and morose moments to exaggerate the moments of carnage in comparison. Most of Fury is quiet, bleak and consuming to watch, but the action is intense and fantastic to see. Tanks aren’t often shown so completely in movies, and Fury shows quite how vulnerable humans are both outside and inside the vehicle! Whenever someone so much as pops their head out of the vehicle you start wincing, fearing some sudden shot will kill them at any moment!
It is a very effective character piece and a solid portrayal of wartime artillery in the guise of Hollywood action. It does suffer from fairly predictable story elements and progression, like I said, our surrogate is a rookie surrounded by veterans, and while you might not be surprised by the time the film ends, you should be moved enough by the acting on show that it more than makes up for these short comings.
I recommend it, it isn’t rife with American propaganda, in fact it muddies what is right and what is wrong as war time so often does very well. Setting the story near the end of the war gives you a real vibe of how senseless and wasteful events truly became.
