Fury

Bringing out the big guns

A US tank crew is tasked with resisting the last desperate efforts of Nazi Germany to destroy allied forces in Fury, a brutally vivid account of war in all its horror that is hampered by a generic America-saves-the-day script.

The way the conflict is exclusively told from the American perspective, condensed into experiences of the men residing inside the cramped innards of the thirty ton metal behemoths that comprised the US 2nd Armoured Division isn’t the problem. Instead it’s how director David Ayer’s (Training Day, End of Watch) overall picture of war, despite his attempts at a non-bias, humanistic story, is reduced to a simplistic black and white paradigm; chiefly that Americans are righteous and deserve our sympathy while the Germans are evil and deserve to be blown up.

And that’s a shame because Fury is one of the most visually impressive war films of recent times. Filmed in misty, mud caked Oxfordshire, using live special effects and with fully functioning recreations of both the Sherman and Tiger tanks, the action could almost have been lifted straight from footage of ‘The World At War’, give or take the colour tweaked, HD sheen.  The uniforms, the locations, the weapons; everything about the production is quality which adds an edge of authenticity.

This pre-occupation with realism, akin to the likes of Saving Private Ryan is one of Fury’s main strengths. Several scenes – in particular one involving an ambush by a German Tiger tank – will have you griping your seat and, with the sound production ensuring every shell blast feels like it’s exploding next to you, possibly covering your ears. Like Spielberg, Ayer does not shy away from showing the devastating effect such high calibre weaponry has on feeble human flesh and the level of violence and suffering shown belies the film’s certificate 15 rating. At times the imagery is distressing and likely to stick in the mind which is of course the point, hammering home an idea of the truly appalling conditions the soldiers had to endure.

For the majority of the film Fury’s believability also extends to its characterisation of the men who control the wheeled canon-mounted fortresses. Anchored by lead Brad Pitt, Jon Bernthal, Shia Lebouf and Michael Pina all do a solid job of convincing they are the battle hardened, tight-knit unit that have managed to survive multiple engagements, gaining a reputation in the process as seriously bad news for any Krauts that stand in their way.

The allied tank crews depended on each other for their lives and to ensure his actors experienced a notion of what such pressure was like Ayer notoriously put them through gruelling preparatory training, even admitting to manipulating them further during principal shooting in order to push them to their emotional limits. Though it’s a rather dastardly directorial technique (from which some of the cast have stated they are still recovering psychologically) the effectiveness shows on screen as the actors bicker, argue and at times seem moments away from genuinely pummelling each other, conveying the strain such unimaginably claustrophobic conditions must have had on those on the frontline.

It’s certainly not the ideal environment for young replacement gunner Norman Ellison (played by a fresh faced Logan Lerman), plucked from his clerking position, to be thrust into, especially when his total inexperience leads him to declare he is unable to kill Germans. There are shades of Platoon and Willam Dafoe’s Sgt. Elias in Pitt’s square jawed Sgt. Don Collier as he begrudgingly tries to teach Norman the harsh lessons needed to survive whilst knowing the virtue that must be stamped out to be his only salvation.

Fury is at its most engaging when asking if it is possible for men to preserve their souls when given no choice but to do hellish things. A pivotal scene that sees our protagonists sitting down to a meal in the house of two terrified German women poses a sombre answer to this conundrum. We are made aware throughout the film that the war is coming to an end, but as the men struggle to see beyond the absurdity of maintaining the airs of civilised table manners demanded by Sgt. Collier -the terrors of their past experience and of those recently endured being ever present – we come to doubt whether they will ever again be able to regain any sense of a normal existence.

Unfortunately from here the nuances in Fury’s sentiment become overstated (there are just one too many shots of Shia LeBouf with a single tear rolling down his cheek) and the cohesion of the film slackens. The last thirty minutes are dedicated to an almost cartoonish last stand which sees indiscriminate slaughter of countless Germans while the US tank and its crew are set up for martyrdom.  In a film which aims for, and by in large succeeds in, delivering a sense of authenticity, the climax is an odd change in tack. But of course, rare is the modern Hollywood war film that can completely shed its ‘America didn’t start the war but by God we finished it’ sensibilities.

Despite this sizeable blip in the finale Fury is still worth seeing, if not for the ‘industry mould’ script then certainly for its interpretation of tank warfare – an area still relatively unexplored in the vast back catalogue of World War II films. The strong acting and exhilarating set pieces will mean most will remain engaged throughout the hefty 134 minute runtime, but in the end the film’s booming artillery is supressed by its brazenly one sided and ultimately unrealistic trajectory, making it fall noticably short of the genre greats.