Brad Pitt kills Nazis. What more do you want?
My father was a tank commander in the Army. Of all the bits of wisdom he passed down to me over the years, one was: "Son, don't join the Army." Actually he didn't say it quite that politely.
I figure if anyone knows a good tank movie it would be my Dad. So when he told me "Go see Fury on the big screen" I took his advice.
I would definitely recommend it if you like that sort of thing. I've watched a lot of war movies and I'd say it's as good as any I've seen.
I'll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum but there will be a few here.
The story here has been told a thousand times. A small band makes a heroic stand against overwhelming odds. It's Zulu or 300 or the last half of Saving Private Ryan except with tanks.
It's directed by David Ayer (Training Day) who I can take or leave. I still haven't forgiven him for U-571 where he rewrote history to have the Americans capture the German Enigma decoder rather than the British. Because it always has to be about us I guess.
I willing to forgive Ayer's past sins for this movie, which I thought was quite good and fairly accurate historically.
The movie stars Brad Pitt as Don "Wardaddy" Collier, a war weary Sergeant commanding the titular Sherman M4A3E8 tank. I'm not a huge Brad Pitt fan, but when he's good, he's good. In this movie he's great.
Most of the Hollywood war movie stock characters are here:
Grizzled Sergeant - check.
Baby-faced Lieutenant - check.
Bible-quoting Southerner - check.
Raw recruit - check.
Wise Captain - check.
Evil SS troops - check, check and check.
The only one missing is the "Smart-ass kid from Brooklyn". Every proper WWII movie should have one.
To set the stage, it's 1945 and the US Army is pushing deep into Germany, meeting fanatical resistance. A sign sternly warns "YOU ARE IN AN ENEMY COUNTRY".
At the beginning of the movie we learn that Collier's bow gunner has been killed. His replacement is fresh recruit Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a clerk typist who hasn't even been to armor school and never so much as sat in a tank.
I guess now is as good a time as any to talk about WWII tanks. WWII tanks came in several flavors: light, medium and heavy. Light tanks were built for speed and were generally used for recon. They could also be useful for zipping around behind enemy lines after a "breakthrough". They were supposed to outrun what they couldn't outgun.
Heavy tanks were like a rolling fortress. Big armor, big gun but generally slow. They worked better on the defense than the offense. The US didn't field a true heavy tank until the last days of the war.
Medium tanks were your all-around jack of all trades. They were usually the most common tanks on the battlefield. They were supposed to support the infantry but also have the ability to fight other tanks. The German Panzer MkIV, the excellent Soviet T-34 and the American Sherman were all medium tanks.
The Sherman was built with ease of manufacture and mobility in mind. US Army doctrine at the time was for tanks to fight infantry and tank-destroyers to fight tanks. Of course there's never a tank-destroyer around when you need one.
It was a pretty decent tank in 1942 but by 1945 it was badly outgunned and outmatched by most of its competition. Only a very small number of Shermans made it all the way from D-Day to Berlin.
Shermans also had a bad tendency to burn when hit. Either the ammunition would explode or the gasoline would burn. Either way, if you die in a tank you die ugly. The Sherman's nickname was "Ronson" because like the lighter it "Lights up the first time, every time!"
The Sherman did have a few good qualities. It was very reliable and highly mobile. A Sherman at the front was at least better than a Panzer V (Panther) stuck 10 miles down the road with a failed transmission (it happened frequently). The Sherman could also be produced in mass quantities and easily shipped to Europe. We built so many that we gave quite a few to the Russians and the British. Many were destroyed but there were always plenty more where those came from.
As one captured German officer remarked: "You sent a tank up the road and we shot it. You sent another tank up the road and we shot it. We ran out of shells, you didn't run out of tanks."
Sometimes quantity has its own quality. It sucks if you're part of that quantity, however, which takes us back to the movie.
The titular "Fury".
In this case the quantity is Collier (Brad Pitt) and his veteran crew: Boyd "Bible" Swan (Shia LaBeouf), Grady "Coon-Ass" Travis (Jon Bernthal), and Trini "Gordo" Garcia (Michael Peña). The veterans initially treat Norman with more animosity than sympathy. This I would say is historically accurate. Nobody wanted to get close to the new guy because he probably wouldn't live that long. No point getting too attached.
Brad Pitt just looks RIGHT in this part. I think he's if anything better looking now that he's older.
There's not a lot of background given about the characters. Collier's accent places him from somewhere in the Midwest or possibly Texas. We don't know. "Coon-Ass" is presumably from South Louisiana, since that is a derogatory term for a Cajun. "Gordo" is Hispanic and presumably from the Southwest. "Bible" sounds like he's from the Southeast and is devoutly religious. We never find out where Norman is from because they tell him "nobody cares". In a break from war movie traditions we're never told about wives, children or sweethearts back home.
While Brad Pitt is the star, much of the movie involves Norman's baptism by fire and growth as a character. Here is where some poetic license was taken by the Director. (spoiler alert) Norman goes from inept recruit to hardened killing machine in about two days.
The plot goes from Norman's forced adjustment to life in a tank to his first exposure to battle where (another spoiler) he screws up and gets people killed. Standard war movie fare but a very well done scene.
Manly men doing manly things.
There is a combined armor and infantry assault against a German position that is wonderfully choreographed. It shows both the "fog of war" and the use of combined arms as the tanks and infantry support each other.
Then it's on to take a German town. The film gives a good depiction of the state of Germany in 1945. We see 12-year-old Hitler youth, both male and female thrown into battle. We see hungry German women willing to prostitute themselves for a bit of food. We see children hung from trees for refusing to fight. To quote Indiana Jones in another movie: "Nazis. I hate these guys."
There is a quiet interlude in the captured town between Norman, Collier and two German girls. This scene goes maybe five minutes too long but is otherwise well done.
(spoiler) When the rest of the crew shows up to crash the party, things get interesting in a hurry. Jon Berthnal is especially good here at going from jovial to menacing in nothing flat. War makes good people do bad things, and you get the idea that these guys are capable of doing bad things. They're not Nazis but they're not squeaky clean either.
The last half of the movie is almost non-stop action. Collier's platoon of four tanks is given a desperate mission to defend a strategic crossroads against a German division that has slipped behind the lines. If the Germans get past them, they'll tear up the supply lines and bad things will happen. Finally, a war movie that at least mentions logistics!
The action is everything you'd hope for. (spoiler) We get to see a battle between the Shermans and a German Tiger I. This is the real deal too! The only actual running Tiger tank in the world was used in this scene.
If you were an Allied tank crew, your day just got a lot worse.
Someone did their homework for this scene. A Sherman was hopelessly outclassed by a Tiger. So are
four Shermans. The Tiger's deadly 88mm gun could rip through a Sherman like butter. The "Easy Eight's" smaller 76mm could only get through the Tiger's massive armor from close range, and then only from the rear. From the front you could bounce shells off it all day and just scratch the paint. As anyone who watched
Kelly's Heroes knows "The only way to kill a Tiger is to shoot it in the ass".
This fight against the Tiger is my favorite scene in the movie. It's tense, heart-pounding and terrifying. They are going up against a monster here and the Tiger might as well be Godzilla, except it's real.
Finally it's on to the heroic stand against the Nazi hordes. I won't give too much away, but this scene is beautifully shot. The nighttime scenes with tracers arcing everywhere are almost mesmerizing.
The great thing about having SS in a movie is you can kill them all day long and not feel bad about it. You're just making the world a better place.
It's hard not to smile as you watch Fury lay down fire and steel while Brad Pitt taunts the Germans "Send me more pigs to kill!" As heroic stands go, it's a damn good one.
The SS troops are portrayed as competent, well led, soldiers. Which they were. They're bad guys and we have no problem watching them die, but they're played realistically.
Before you run out to see it, be warned that this movie is gory. It's right up there with Saving Private Ryan in the gore department. Heads and faces get blown off. People burn. Lots of people burn. The stuntmen got a real workout here. "Aw geez do I have to put the fire-suit on again?"
I would say this is not a "date movie" unless your date has a strong stomach. There are few female characters and not much romance. It's mostly "manly men doing manly things". I made sure Mrs. Kong knew what she was signing up for with this movie. She actually enjoyed it, but I probably owe her at least one chick-flick in exchange (fair's fair).
Overall I'd give it A for accuracy, A for action, B for body count and G for lots and lots of gore.