Good but with some reservations....

Rating: 7/10 (24 October 2014)

I really enjoyed the movie. It is not for the squeamish, and has upped the ante in the Saving Private Ryan level of graphic violence and gore. Being a long time avocational historian of WWII I was impressed by the historical accuracy of the equipment on display in the movie. Aside from some quibbles with some of the Sherman Tank model improvements having not been available at the time, one has to marvel that they could find as many serviceable Shermans as they did. The only thing that detracted from the movie was the standard clichés. The is one, and I dare say you'll notice it, if you ever watched the old Henry Fonda – Telly Savalas epic, The Battle of the Bulge, and the HBO mini series Band of Brothers, which stole the cliché from the former and now it's in Fury. (Spoiler) Let's just say, it isn't safe to be a nurse or civilian female who makes an attachment to a paratrooper or tank crewman. It turns your domicile into an artillery shell magnet. Remember the typist/interpreter from Saving Private Ryan? He's ba-a-a-c-k! This time in the guise of a bow machine gunner and is just as inept and pacifist as before. Hell I even think they hired the German trooper he refused to shoot and released only to have him kill Tom Hanks, and who he finally decides to execute. You know, the worm turns scene near the end. I believe he's the guy Pitt and the typist shoot with the pistol. The undercurrent of the movie, I believe is that Pitt has seen too much in the war, from North Africa, (he left out Sicily), France and Belgium, and is looking for redemption and finds that there is none for him or his men. Pitt wrongly states he's in the 6th Army (commanded by Gen. Patch,) when the 2nd Armored was part of Patton' s 3rd Army. Hollywood has some kind of aversion to Patton these days as if you acquire some kind of taint if you served under him. Another cliché is they make out the Germans, particularly the SS, as inept bumbling suicidal numb-skulls, when arguably they were the most combat effective soldiers of the war. Sure they lost, but they didn't fight for six years against Russia, US, France, and Britain by being stupid. I know Hollywood has to make concessions to the camera, like cramming things into a scene that normally would have been 50 to 100 yards apart (like tanks). Dug in anti-tank guns usually had a pretty high first shot kill average, but these Germans keep missing at less than 200 yards. Panzerfausts the German bazooka like things, (the word means Tank Fist) were good out to about 100 yards, closer than 50 yards and you'd likely get killed by your own success. So why do the Germans insist on charging suicidally close to use them? The attack across the field against a dug in company of Germans with two maybe three antitank guns and they have no mortars? A small mortar barrage into the packed lines of GIs behind the tanks would have ended the attack in about a minute. Standard Doctrine for every army is to strip attacking tanks of infantry support and then kill the lumbering blind pachyderms at your leisure, if they are so stupid to keep attacking without infantry. This German commander must have missed that lesson in basic infantry school. Similarly, the commander in the final climactic scene must have learned his tactics and doctrine from the Japanese, and his German troops stage the first and last Banzai charge executed in Europe. The final and most ludicrous camera shot was at the end, an aerial shot of the tank standing guard at the crossroads, surrounded my masses of German dead, and not a one was so stupid as to get shot and fall on any of the four roads around the tank, which were pristinely clear of any debris of battle, corpses included. There was a shot earlier in the film of the body of a fallen German being run over by a tank in a grisly close up, but here we are to presume that the relieving soldiers meticulously picked up the dead as to not mess up the treads of their tanks, and hear I recall Patton telling his troops to use their guts to grease them! Now having vented, I reiterate, the movie was good, go see it. The success of the film will no doubt encourage Hollywood to continue to use the same clichés until we begin to wince and only then will they stop using them. Pitt, Labeouf , Jon Bernthal (Walking Dead) and Pena all turn in good solid performances and will have you engaged and at times even repulsed. The action will have you on the edge of your seat.