Fury has its cake and eats it too

Rating: 8/10 (15 November 2014)

There is a paradox in making an anti-war film. If you're telling the audience how awful war is, you don't want to show everything that you would expect out of a movie about a war. Things like protagonists who survive mission after mission, villains who need to be taken down and are finally defeated at the end of the hour-and-a-half running time, dramatic deaths where people get to give a short speech before life exits their bodies, cool sequences of combat and exciting moments with explosions. They're essential to a movie because movies are a visual medium and the moment you bring those images to the screen, you're glorifying combat. "Fury" is one of the rare instances where it can have its cake and eat it too. It is both an exciting war movie and a condemnation of the ugliness that is brought forth by armed conflict.
I want to talk about how brutal this movie is. This is an incredibly violent film. It's not gory, but it's violent and very disturbing in its violence. When people die in this film, and there are a lot of people that die, they die horrible deaths. People are set on fire by bombs, have their limbs blown off by high-speed projectiles, get reduced to red pulp by grenades or have chunks of their heads ripped out by shrapnel and bullets. The battlefield these soldiers are fighting on are covered in mud, the people that are fighting are covered with grime and the animosity between the two sides mean that for a lot of these people, a quick death is the best you can hope for. I found the violence to be shocking, sudden and very unsettling, even more so because it's often so casual. Someone gets shot in the head and crumples over like a rag doll but it's no big deal because these soldiers have seen it time and time again.
There were things that never dawned on me before I watched this movie. Things like the fact that tanks are more than bullet-proof cannons on wheels, they're also massive vehicles and if you don't get out of the way fast enough, you're going to get crushed. Reduced to paste underneath those treads. That's a frightening and horrible way to die and something that probably happened to a lot of soldiers. Let's say that you've got a scenario where you're in a dugout and you're shooting at some tanks. The tanks just keep advancing no matter how many bullets hit them and they fire back. Get out of that hole, and you're going to get shot. Stay inside and you're going to get crushed. Other things that I never really thought about that I saw during this movie included the way tanks must have operated in combat. The way not only bullets, but rockets easily bounce off of the armor, the way the people inside have to look through tiny slits and bombard opponents or the way that these armored fortresses becomes people's homes once they've been in there long enough fascinated me.
I found that all of the performances in the film were quite good. I thought the characters were deceptively complicated and it allowed the performers to really shine. Even some of the "bad guys" that at first I thought would just be one-dimensional jerks have moments where they show that they are real people. I thought "Fury" looked great not only because of the special effects, but also because of the accuracy of the sets, the costumes and the vehicles. I even liked some of the visual stylistic choices. There are some examples of great cinematography, a lot of images you've never seen before and some small decisions here and there that really help make some of the battle sequences easy to follow.
Some people are going to criticize the end of the movie because a large chunk of it is dedicated to a big, special effects-heavy and impressive sequence. For the majority of the film, we're seeing combat through the eyes of the newcomer to the crew. He is appalled, as we as regular civilians are, at what he sees. The carnage on the battlefield, the way that war changes good men into animals, the senseless death, the degradation of morals, the way people revel in killing each other. As it is explained it to him though, this is what war is. Even though that enemy soldier has a wife and a son, he is going to kill you unless you kill him first. So what can you do? To stop yourself from going crazy, just embrace your situation. It's really easy to say that shooting soldiers that are surrendering is wrong, but until you've been in that situation yourself, you don't know what it's like. That's what works about the end here. For the bulk of the movie, you're the civilian on the outside looking in. But this movie runs 2 hours and 15 minutes. The running time means that eventually you begin associating more with the people in the movie than you do with the "real" world. Like the men inside the war, your attitude changes and you don't think of enemy soldiers as people anymore, you see them as threats. The film is more than just a show you're watching, it's a way to get yourself into the head of the people on the battlefield. If only for that second half of the movie, the story changes you.
"Fury" does not glorify war, but it isn't a sappy drama on the subject either. It's an exciting action movie and a moving drama too. There are some images and some ideas brought forth by this film that I will never forget. I have a lot of admiration for "Fury" and I strongly encourage you to go see it on the big screen, where the explosions are going to be loud and shocking. (Theatrical version on the big screen, November 13, 2014)