Singular and rather obvious (SPOILERS)

Rating: Null/10 (7 December 2014)

This year has been a very busy one for me with time seeming to race by; indeed so much so that it did not occur to me it was getting close to awards season in early 2015. This thought entered my head a good part way into watching Fury; I was wondering why it was being the way it was and why it seemed so determined to be so very much one way, then I realized that this is one of many films that are mostly about awards success for all involved. The general narrative here is that we join an American tank during the final months of WWII, fighting their way as part of an assault into the heart of Germany. The small team are led by Don Collier, a tough and experienced commander, who has to keep his team focused, alive, and moving forward. A team where a death means that they are joined by green recruit Norman.
This is the narrative, but really the film is not about a story so much as showing that "war is hell", with lots of performances, speeches, gore, and predictability in the plotting. To say it is relentless in this is an understatement – it never stops pushing this message and if there is even a small chance to remind us, then the film takes us there. Every character will die once we start to engage with them; any character that the crew engage with will suffer and die, and so on. As an exercise in nihilism then the film does mostly work because it is relentless in how pointless it is, whether it be cruelty of man, child soldiers, the horror of random violence, the physiological effects of killing, or anything else, the film is really on point for these. The problem with it is not these aspects but rather than it pretty much contains nothing else.
There is the feeling watching it that as well as a script supervisor and someone watching continuity, we also had someone making sure that every single "war is hell" cliché was covered too. This continues through the film and to be honest the lack of anything else did make it less and less impacting as it went on – almost numbing, which in no way is the thing it was looking for. This is not to say that it is not professionally made and very authentic in its portrayal of life on the front, or the use of real tanks, but just that this cannot make up for the lack of content. Despite that so much of it is about the pointlessness of it all, the final section turns into a boys' own adventure where we see the SS mown down like we were still at war and this was a propaganda film showing the glory of death and sacrifice. It is such an odd change to the tone of the film, but at least it allows all of those involved an heroic Oscar clip death, and of course a brief (and ridiculous) moment of humanity to end the film on.
The cast are all solid enough, but it is really hard to escape the feeling that they are all playing clichés to a certain extent. Pitt, Peña, Bernthal, Parrack, Isaacs, Henke, all do solid work but nothing really more than that in terms of characters. Lerman does as well as he can with a simple "eyes of the audience" character. Technically the film is very impressive whether it be the use of authentic tanks, the scale of the film, or the sound and gore, which are flinch-inducing. None of this is an issue, it is just that there is little beyond it and as a result the film does feel like it is hammering the same point endlessly, rather than telling a good story and letting this come out of it.